


Skeleton Key

by a_gay_poster



Category: Naruto
Genre: Basically just an excuse to get everyone in fancy outfits, Bodyguard, Ceremonial Dress, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Happy Birthday Skuun!, M/M, Mutual Pining, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:21:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24896848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/pseuds/a_gay_poster
Summary: Rock Lee: Handsome Green Devil of the Leaf Village! Master of the Eight Gates! . . . Consort of the Kazekage?When Lee is asked to pose as Gaara’s significant other at a coronation in order to avert an assassination attempt, he readily agrees. He’ll do anything to protect Gaara. Even if he has to leave his weights at the door. Even if he has to face down the Wind Country diplomats who don’t consider him a shinobi because he can’t do ninjutsu. Even if he has to spend hours looking at Gaara’s handsome face in ceremonial makeup. (This may be more difficult than he anticipated.)
Relationships: Gaara/Rock Lee
Comments: 131
Kudos: 444





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EgregiousDerp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EgregiousDerp/gifts).



> Happy birthday, Skuun!! Thank you so much for spending so many hours of your day talking about Gay Ninjas (TM) with me. I hope your birthday is fantastic (and I apologize I didn't get this whole thing finished in time. It sprawled out to four chapters, in typical fashion). 
> 
> Title and inspiration from [Skeleton Key by Dessa.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-elJDC8N7I) Thanks to my wife and beta [trustmeimthe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trustmeimthe) for beta-ing. Any remaining mistakes are my own. 
> 
> Warnings: a character makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it joke about killing himself, relationships with significant age gaps are mentioned (not in an affirming way), canon-typical violence, themes of prejudice (including ableism, classism, and prejudice against other clans/villages).

“I don’t get why I can’t be Gaara’s bodyguard for this fancy shindig.”

Temari sighed into the mirror, carefully straightening the collar of her robes. The collar was high, just brushing her cheekbones, and decorated with so much ornate gold embroidery that the stiff red fabric underlying it could hardly be seen. She leveled Kankuro with a steely stare. 

“ _Because_ I need you for the actual _mission_.” She scoffed. “And besides, there aren’t any bodyguards allowed at the actual dinner, anyway. We wouldn’t be allowed to attend the party at all if we weren’t technically Sunan royalty.” 

“Please try to remember that this isn’t just a fancy party,” Gaara said very quietly. It was almost eerie at times, the way he seemed to fade into walls and shadows when he wasn’t speaking, the way his presence suddenly commanded all the attention in the room with a single word or gesture. Unlike his siblings, he wasn’t yet dressed in his formal regalia, still in his preferred plain dark trousers and long red coat, its hem trailing from his position crouched on the sill of the room’s single round window. He looked young, perched like that, despite his age. A child king, needful of a regent. “It’s an important diplomatic event.”

“And an assassination attempt,” Temari added lowly. 

Gaara clicked his tongue. “And that.” 

“I don’t see why we even agreed to go to this thing,” Kankuro grumbled, jockeying with Temari for a position at the mirror, his face halfway into dark shades of ceremonial makeup. The white paint on his face made the purple puppeteer markings drawn atop them all the starker, the typical thick blocks of color replaced with intricate whorls and paisleys. “C’mon, a closed-door dinner with no weapons and no bodyguards? Did they really expect us _not_ to think it was a set-up?” 

“It wasn’t a matter of agreeing,” Gaara said sedately. “It’s simply an expectation that we be present for the Jackal Clan’s coronation ceremony. The dinner afterwards is an excellent opportunity to establish and strengthen diplomatic ties with the new ruler of one of the largest clans in Wind Country.”

“And to get murdered in front of a bunch of dignitaries,” Kankuro muttered. 

“Well.” Temari’s mouth in the mirror drew into a thin line. “Dignitaries _and_ their significant others. Which is where you come in.” 

Temari’s head swiveled as if on a pivot to stare at Lee. 

“Me?” Lee’s voice cracked on the vowel. He had been standing by the door with perfect posture, awaiting a hint as to his part in the proceedings, and his spine went even more rigid at the indication.

If he was honest, he had hardly read over the mission scroll that assigned him here. He had been summoned to the Hokage’s office, heard the words ‘Suna’ and ‘Kazekage’, and had shouted, “Yes, of course!” before the sentence had even fully left Kakashi-sama’s mouth. His sprint to Suna in a record two days had left little time to do more than skim the mission specifications, heart in his mouth every time his eyes caught on Gaara’s name, the character for _love_ in its center. And once he had arrived, he had been just as quickly spirited away to this hotel room in the walled city of Oukan, the capital of Wind Country. 

Even though he had nominally traveled with Gaara’s party, they’d hardly had any time to see each other, with Gaara getting swept aside even in the midst of heavy travel for extremely serious-looking conversations. They’d certainly had no time to catch up properly. And no time at all for Lee to ask exactly why it was that _he_ had been chosen as the sole representative from the Leaf Village for this particular mission. 

“The entire who’s who of Wind Country will be at this party,” Temari went on. “And while Suna has finally started warming up to Gaara’s leadership, the rest of Wind Country hasn’t gotten there yet. There are basically two factions at play here—” Temari extended two fingers; her long nails had been filed until they resembled blades, painted shiny in the Nara Clan black. She wiggled them in illustration. “—and neither of them are very pleased with Gaara being Kazekage.” 

Temari turned fully from the mirror, leaving Kankuro to his endless minute adjustments of his face paints, and strode across the room to stand in front of Lee. The heavy train of her robes trailed behind her, the heels of her boots clacking beneath the rush of fabric against the stone floor. She looked Lee up and down as if appraising him. He straightened further under her scrutiny, chin held high and arms in perfect ‘at ease’ position behind his back. 

Gaara’s low voice carried through the room; Lee’s head snapped to him. “There are those who still think me a monster, and therefore too dangerous to rule. And there are those who think my … affections for the Leaf Village have made me too soft to pose a threat. They _wanted_ a monster, and they’re disappointed they got a man instead.”

Temari’s fingers cut the air like knives as she curled them into a fist. A sneer dominated her face. “There’s a saying in Wind Country: The husband is the head of the family, but the wife is the neck; she tells the head where to turn. And while the capital and the daimyo are the head of Wind, Suna is in many ways its neck. Whatever cultural mores our shinobi adopt, the civilians of Wind are sure to follow eventually.” 

Kankuro fluffed his thick fur collar in the mirror. It was fennec fox fur and burrow owl feathers, Lee thought, expensive materials but uniquely Sunan, and it had been dyed so dark a purple it was almost black. He picked off a fleck of lint Lee couldn’t see and raised his thickly painted eyebrows. “Yeah, people got _real_ pissy when Gaara started trying to reform stuff. And I’m not just talkin’ about, like, letting folks like you in the Academy. Even basic stuff. Letting folks import of luxury goods and not just staples. Letting moms an’ dads take time off after their kids are born to bond with them. Shit, you shoulda seen the number of letters he got when he started building those damn greenhouses so we could grow our own food. You woulda thought he’d passed a law banning hawk hunting or something.” 

Temari rolled her eyes. “Gaara’s a reformer, but he’d never be stupid enough to try _that_. But Kankuro’s right. Oukan being on the coast means they’ve always had more access to goods than Suna has, but there’s still a lot of cultural pride tied up in Wind Country being hardy, salt-of-the-earth people. The kind of people who work hard and expect nothing for it. So the notion that ordinary citizens might get _ideas_ about having a better life, one with meaning and joy rather than just endless toil and obedience … it makes some of the nobles wary.” 

“Unfortunately, this closed-door meeting with the leaders of the largest clans and cities presents the perfect opportunity for them to make those concerns known,” Gaara said, “ by force if necessary. I’ll be without my sand and without my ANBU, so they assume I’ll be vulnerable.” 

“Which is why we needed you, Lee,” Temari said, narrowing her eyes and tugging critically at a long lock of his bowlcut, “to pose as Gaara’s neck.”

Lee froze for a moment, confused. If the head was Oukan—or the husband—then that meant the neck was … 

“His _what?_ ” Lee yelped. 

Temari drew her hand back immediately, her lips pursed. 

“His consort. You _did_ read the mission scroll, didn’t you?”

Kankuro saved Lee from having to lie by yawning. “I might neck _myself_ , listening to all this boring shit,” he drawled, stretching his arms over his head. The bones in his back cracked in sequence like the rattling joints of his puppets. 

Temari cut her eyes at him, then back to Lee. He withered under her glare. 

“We only had two options here,” she said sharply. “Nobody in that room is going to be willing to see Gaara for the person he actually _is_ , so we could either lean into their preconceived notions that he’s a monster, or we could try to convince them that he’s gone soft.” 

Gaara stood from his perch in the window with a swish of fabric and began crossing the room towards Lee. Lee felt his muscles growing stiffer at Gaara’s approach, the blood rushing in his ears. 

“And I didn’t relish the idea of showing up in a cloak made of my enemies’ skins,” Gaara said quietly.

Lee choked. “You don’t—!” 

Gaara scoffed. “Of course not.” There was a tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth, a slight wrinkling of his eyes. The hint of a smile. “It was a joke.” 

Gaara was closer now. Lee found he couldn’t tear his eyes away to look at Temari even as she began to speak again.

“We hope it will throw them off-balance for Gaara to show up with a consort from the Leaf Village—” Lee almost ignored her, captivated by the minute shifts in Gaara’s expression: a pursing of his lips, a flare of his nostrils. “—and a _civilian_ consort, at that.” 

_That_ caught Lee’s attention. His head whipped to face her. “But I am not a civilian!”

“By the laws of most of Wind Country you are,” Kankuro cut in. He leaned back against the far wall, one ankle crossed over the other. He would have looked almost casual if he weren’t drowning in finery. “No ninjutsu, no ninja. As far as Oukan is concerned, you’re just a guy who can run fast and kick hard.”

“Oh.” Lee deflated. All of his accomplishments, reduced to those few words: _run fast and kick hard._ Perhaps Kankuro was right. Perhaps the rest of Wind Country was right, not to think of him as a shinobi … 

Something softened in Temari’s glare. “That’s the whole point,” she said, and while her tone wasn’t quite _gentle_ , it was as close to it as she ever got. “We’re relying on them underestimating you _and_ Gaara. Letting their guard down. Not seeing either of you as a threat. Kankuro and I will be there to back you up if you need it. We won’t be allowed in the room the dinner’s held in, but we’ll be in the ballroom just outside, listening in.” She leaned forward and clipped something to Lee’s earlobe. An earring, he thought, golden and ornate. 

Over her shoulder, he saw Kankuro hold up a tiny, shimmering device and attach it to his collar. From a distance, it looked like nothing more than a spiraling gold brooch, the shape of the Suna crest done in intricate metalwork. On her own high collar, Temari wore its twin. Kankuro moved his fingers, chakra threads just on the barest edge of sight, and a spitting, crackling noise began in Lee’s ear. 

“The second we hear anything suspicious,” Kankuro’s voice said, piped through the little speaker and directly into Lee’s ear, “we’ll jump in. We don’t know who these people are or what they look like, so you’ll need to be our eyes and ears.” 

Lee took a deep, steadying breath. He could do this, he thought. He _had_ to. For the sake of the mission and for Gaara, he had to be able to pretend that—well. It wasn’t _really_ a lie, was it? The circumstances may have been imperfect, sure, but the feelings themselves were true. And Lee was an expert at showing his true emotions. 

“Lee,” came Gaara’s low voice. Lee almost jumped in shock. When had he gotten so _close?_ Gaara’s thin fingers rested on Lee’s elbow. Suddenly he found it was very hard to breathe. Gaara’s skin was cool and rough through the thin fabric of his jumpsuit—the Sand Armor. “Are you all right with this? I thought you understood the specifics of the mission. But if you’re at all uncomfortable—if you don’t want to do this, I’ll call the mission off and handle it by myself.” 

The only thought more frightening to Lee than having to be in a room full of strangers who all misjudged him was the idea of Gaara having to face their cruel eyes and sharp tongues on his own. Lee hated nothing more than people who didn’t say what they meant, who spoke in double-talk and riddles and hid their true intentions behind kind manners. But he could do anything, he thought—play at courtly etiquette and pretend that he was Gaara’s … _consort_ , his _anything_ —if it meant keeping Gaara safe. It was just a simple bodyguard mission, at the end of the day. Lee had been guarding high-ranking shinobi and nobles most of his adult life. The little wrinkle in this mission … it was nothing. Or if it wasn’t nothing, it was at least _manageable_. 

He shook his head. 

“It’s fine,” he said, chin high. “I can do it. Please do not worry about me.” 

A small amount of tension drained from Temari’s posture. “Good,” she said. “Of course, you’ll have to dress the part, too. You can’t meet the daimyo in green spandex.”

“Not to worry!” Lee said, “I knew there was a formal event involved—” He had heard at least that much of Kakashi-sama’s instructions between the pounding of his heart and the tension sparking up his nerve endings. “—so I brought a lovely green jacket that I wore to Naruto’s wedding.”

“This isn’t some shinobi wedding,” Temari snapped. “This is a _coronation_. And the capital has very high expectations. Rules that need to be followed. Formalities. Traditions. The customary clothing and make-up.”

Lee gulped. “Make-up?” He had seen Kankuro painting his face, of course, but he had thought—! Kankuro _always_ wore—! And he was a puppeteer, surely things were different—!

“But I don’t know how to do any of that,” Temari concluded. “So I’ll let the master do his work.” 

She took a step backwards and clapped Kankuro on the shoulder. 

Under the dark purple paint, Kankuro’s smile widened into a Cheshire grin.

  


* * *

  


Lee has been sitting in the chair with his back to Gaara for what felt like an age, letting Kankuro work him over with an array of colored paints and powders so large it looked like an artist’s palette. 

“Fucking—waste of my time, anyway, could’ve just made a buncha puppets. Nobody woulda been able to tell the difference … ” 

He had been going on in this manner almost since his work on Lee had commenced, and Gaara found his anxiety rising along with his anticipation the longer that Kankuro dithered over Lee’s face. Squinting, standing back, leaning back in, licking the tip of his brush before resuming. Gaara half-expected him to get out his screwdriver next and begin tinkering with Lee’s joints. 

Finally, Kankuro stood back and sighed, setting his brush down with a clatter. 

“All right,” he said. “I reckon this is the best I can do. You didn’t give me a whole lot to work with here, kid. But let’s see what the boss-man has to say.” 

Kankuro spun the chair to face the back of the room. Gaara stood from his perch on the windowsill, and immediately felt all the blood leave his legs. 

Lee’s face had been done up in big, dark blocks of Sunan teal. The wide circles of his dark eyes had been reshaped by the paint into unrecognizable angles, parallelograms whose shapes mimicked Gaara’s own: like the marks of a magnet release user but darker, starker. The deep brown of Lee’s irises seemed to swim towards black against the markings, his long eyelashes fanned longer with strands of gold that swept his cheeks. Thick, angular shapes marked out the shape of his jaw and cheekbones, the thin lines of his lips obscured by a stripe of gold paint that reached almost to his chin. Circles of a darker shade of blue demarcated his hairline, where his hair had been swept back to make room for the hat and veil that would be pinned there. 

Gaara stood very still for a moment, just staring. Lee’s shoulders began climbing towards his ears. Even under the heavy paint, Gaara could see his skin heating. 

Without his bangs in the way, Gaara could see every ridge of Lee’s skull. The places where the soft fontanelle once sutured. Where he was once vulnerable and reformed stronger. 

Gaara stepped closer. The bulge of Lee’s throat worked in a swallow. He looked at the same time more like himself and less like himself, the bright colors making the darks of him all the darker in turn. There was just one thing … 

Gaara cupped Lee’s jaw with one hand and licked his other thumb.

“Um, Gaara-kun … ?” Lee started. The muscles of his jaw were tense. 

Gaara swiped his thumb across the space over each of Lee’s eyes. 

“Hey!” he heard Kankuro interject. “I put a lot of work into that, y’know!”

Gaara held Lee’s face steady in his hand as his eyebrows were exposed from under the paint and powder. Lee’s eyes had gone very wide. His pulse jackrabbited under Gaara’s palm, his body still as a hare caught in the sightline of a hawk. 

“There.” Gaara stepped back, and for a moment Lee stayed right where he had been, stooped to meet Gaara’s hands and eyeline. “That’s perfect.” 

“Great.” Kankuro clapped Lee on the shoulder hard, and the spell seemed to break. Lee straightened suddenly. “Now go get dressed. Clothes are on your bed. Holler for Temari if you get stuck.”

“But Temari’s a _woman_ , I couldn’t possibly ask her to—” Lee babbled as Kankuro steered him to the door.

“Trust me, it’s nothing she ain’t seen before.” Kankuro paused at the doorway, hand on the knob. “Oh, and one last thing. You have _got_ to stop calling him ‘Gaara-kun’! You’re supposed to be his consort, for gods’ sake, not his good buddy!” 

Lee’s cry of apology was cut off by the door slamming behind him. 

Kankuro wheeled on Gaara.

“All right, pipsqueak. Your turn in the doctor’s chair.” 

Gaara very diplomatically refrained from rolling his eyes. “I wasn’t aware you’d attended medi-nin school,” he said as he climbed into the chair. Lee’s long legs had meant that it was raised uncomfortably high, and he summoned a small amount of sand to boost himself into its seat. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Kankuro griped. “Keep pickin’ at me and see if I don’t draw a shrew’s back-end on your face.” 

Kankuro was cleaning his brushes when Temari returned to the room with a cup of coffee and a cluster of gold hairpins clutched in her manicured hands.

“Kankuro,” she said carefully, “I ran into Lee in the hallway. Did you tell him I would help him with his _clothes_?” 

Kankuro chuckled. “Aww, I was mostly joking. I know the kid wears that crazy get-up every day, but I figure even he knows how to put on pants and a shirt. Now, if he had to put on Gaara’s outfit—”

Temari’s upper lip raised in a sneer. “I’m not going to do that.”

Kankuro’s shoulders slumped. “I know, I know. But you gotta admit, it woulda been funny if he’d asked you.” 

“I’m sure Lee is more than capable of handling it himself,” Gaara said, unable to keep a certain sharpness from his tone. “He was nervous. You shouldn’t have teased him.” 

“Yeah, we all know how highly you think of Lee’s _capabilities_ ,” Kankuro drawled, loading a brush with powder. 

Gaara bristled. “He’s a remarkable shinobi—” 

Kankuro stopped in the middle of applying a heavy layer of powder to Gaara’s face. “Listen. We should talk about this, actually. Are you gonna be able to hold it together with him tonight? Those people in the daimyo’s court—they’re not going to be kind to him. You can’t go biting someone’s head off because they make fun of his eyebrows or call him a civilian.” 

Gaara exhaled through his nose. He willed the ire to leave him. 

“We have other options, you know,” Temari said softly. Her face was still bare, and beside Kankuro’s heavily decorated face, she looked very weary indeed. “On standby, even. In case this didn’t work out.” 

“Trying to convince the court that Lee’s _teacher_ is my significant other was such a ridiculous notion that I dismissed it out of hand, and rightly so,” Gaara snapped. “He’s over a decade my senior—” 

“Doesn’t stop some of those old coots at the court,” Kankuro added in an undertone.

“Besides, his … unique position with the Hokage is common knowledge in the villages that border Fire.” 

“Yeah, but Gaara,” Kankuro cut in, “there’s other shinobi who can’t do ninjutsu around. Not a ton of them, sure, and none of them with those crazy gates that Lee has, but … We coulda picked one of them instead.” 

Gaara shook his head until Kankuro stilled his chin with his fingers. “There’s nobody I trust more.” 

“For _espionage_?” Kankuro called over his shoulder, loading a brush with gold paint. “He’s not exactly _subtle_ , dude. He’s a shitty liar.” 

Temari, meanwhile, had pulled out a compact mirror from her voluminous robes, and now she sat on a nearby chair, twirling her hair into elaborate structures one-handed, with no small amount of assistance from a small quantity of wind she had conjured to her fingertips. “I don’t think he’s got that much to lie about,” she said. 

Kankuro frowned around a mouthful of brush-ends. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.” She jabbed her scalp with a hairpin. “ _Fuck_.” 

Kankuro craned over the top of Gaara’s head to shout, “If you would just hold your damn horses, I can do that for you.” 

“This is _faster_.” Temari grimaced.

“Yeah, and when you fuck it up, I’m gonna have to do it all over again anyway, and you’ll bitch at me ‘cause your head is sore. Just wait!” 

After a seemingly interminable amount of prodding and bickering, Kankuro finally stood back. 

“Yeah,” he said, “that’ll do ‘er.” 

He stood aside to let Gaara see his handiwork. 

Gaara’s face was matte white with paint, the dark rings around his eyes expanded with shadow until they covered his browbone and nasal bridge like a mask. The ridges of the scar on his forehead had been painted over with gold, and the lines of the character swirled outward now, curling like vines along his hairline and down the sides of his jaw in elaborate, interlocking patterns. Teal lipstick darkened his upper lip into a blue-green shadow, his lower lip invisible under the white. His face looked more bare, decorated skull than it did human flesh.

This had been the point of the ceremonial markings, once, back before they came to stand for the ostentatious peacocking of a makeup artist’s skill: tricking the spirits into thinking you were already dead, so they would not snatch away your life or your prosperity for their own.

As he examined his new countenance, Kankuro came around behind him and set a rams’ horn headdress atop his head, the horns painted black and spiraling with the same golden patterns. Thick bands of teal surrounded the base of the horns, matching the paint on his mouth. With a flourish, Kankuro shook out and pinned the veil of the headdress. It hung down the back of Gaara’s head to brush his shoulders, held in place with little gold ornaments that jingled as he turned to look at his brother.

“Well, it’s a good thing controlling the sand requires a minimum of movement,” he said, “because I can barely turn my head in this thing.” 

“Hopefully the sand doesn’t have to get involved at all,” Kankuro quipped back. “That’s Lee’s whole job. Lucky for him, his headgear isn’t nearly that involved.” 

Gaara got heavily to his feet, the headdress clinking with his every motion. 

“I’m going to go get dressed,” he announced. “Let me know when you two are ready.”

“Shouldn’t take too long. Just gotta paint over all of Temari’s hag marks. Ow—!” Kankuro grabbed his shin where the sharp toe of Temari’s boot had snapped out to kick him. “I take that back, making this witch sightly is going to be a bigger project than I thought.” 

“Gaara, wait.” Temari was on her feet before Gaara had made it halfway to the door. “One last thing.” 

She approached him and opened her palm. Sitting in her hand were two ear cuffs in the shape of skeleton keys, crafted in elaborate scrolling gold work to match the traditional patterns on Gaara’s face and headdress. 

“These belonged to our mother,” Temari told him, fastening one to the shell of each of his ears, so that the base fell just above the bulb of Kankuro’s transmitter. 

Gaara’s chest ached, the way it always did when their mother was mentioned. The sand in the gourd at his waist rustled, and he quieted it. The cuffs were heavier than he would have expected from such a lightweight metal. After a moment he recognized by the way they hummed along with his chakra that they weren’t gold at all, but plated sandstone. 

Temari finished fastening the clasps and patted both his cheeks.

“For good luck,” she said, with a soft, sad smile. “Just in case.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the cultural stuff (music, clothes, etc.) in this chapter is based on real life, and some of it is completely invented. The dances, specifically, are based on the Taskiwin and Asga dances, which are dances from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Look them up if you're interested; they're incredibly beautiful! Other than that, though, please don't take anything in this story as a definitive reflection of any real-world culture. This is a world where people can cast magic lightning bolts at each other, after all. 
> 
> Thanks as always to [trustmeimthe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trustmeimthe) for beta-ing and for helping me work through some of the kinks in the story! Any remaining mistakes are my fault, probably because I didn't listen to her.

“Weapons, please.” 

The man standing at the doorway to the Oukan Palace’s grand ballroom was shorter even than Gaara, making up for his height only with the nasal-high, officious pitch of his voice and the towering of the domed hat that topped his head. The weapons check room behind him was already overflowing with the shed weapons of diplomats and regents, Lee noticed, peering easily over the man’s head. Ceremonial things, mostly, little more than shiny pieces of tin. Nothing that a shinobi would dare carry into battle. Well, nothing that a shinobi would dare carry into battle _if they expected to survive_. 

Gaara unbuckled his gourd and passed it to the man. The sand within hissed agitatedly, and the man’s eyes went wide for a second before Gaara stilled it with a raising of his fingers. 

“My apologies,” he said stiffly. “My mother’s spirit. You understand.” 

“Of—of course,” the man said, all traces of snootiness drained from his voice. Even behind the white powder on his face, he seemed to have gone very pale. “Your mother’s spirit.” 

Gaara hummed and made to step forward. His footsteps beneath the many layers of his robes were tightly constrained. He was able to do little more than shuffle, headdress jingling all the while. It was ridiculous, Lee thought, all show. As if Gaara truly _needed_ the gourd anymore. As if he couldn’t shatter the building’s foundations in an instant with the clench of his hand, and have more minerals available than he needed.

“Ah, excuse me, Lord Kazekage,” the man’s voice wheedled. “There’s just one more thing—” 

Gaara paused. The paint’s markings made his expressions all the more obvious, and right now he wore the look of the spectacularly unimpressed. “Yes?” 

Gaara’s lips were thin without the makeup, the same color of his skin and their shape very subtle, but the teal paint cast the shape of his upper lip into stark, precise relief. The dip in the center. The wide taper at the ends, sloping ever-so-gently down. When he opened his mouth, his tongue inside was pink and obvious. Lee swallowed and tried not to think about it. 

The man clattered on wood-block soles ( _He’s even shorter without the shoes!_ Lee thought, with no small measure of delight.) to come stand in front of Gaara. He positioned his thick fingers very precisely and closed his eyes.

“Release.” 

Gaara’s Sand Armor shimmered and began to fall away, cracking and crumbling into a snake of sand that slithered and curled around his gourd before collapsing into an inert heap. 

Lee narrowed his eyes. Gaara’s ultimate defense was no _henge_ , no genjutsu. It shouldn’t have fallen like that, certainly not to such a weak exertion of chakra. Was that just more theater for the sake of the watching dignitaries ahead, stripping themselves of ornate, bejeweled sabers that landed upon the weapons rack with little tinny clanks?

Seconds later, Gaara’s fingers found the crease of Lee’s elbow. The fabric of Lee’s robes was much thinner than Gaara’s, only two layers: a fine, silky undergarment and its decorative linen overlay, the high collar cut low at the chest to expose delicate, whorling stitchwork in gold and Sunan teal beading. Without the sand on his skin, Gaara’s fingers were very warm, the touch light and almost ticklish. Lee braced himself against a shiver as Gaara’s fingers began to move. 

It took him a few moments to realize Gaara was tapping a pattern, the cadence of short and long taps that shinobi used to communicate over distances, when they didn’t want to be intercepted by civilians. 

Gaara looked up at Lee. His eyelashes, normally a pale, sandy red, were dark with makeup. Lee felt his face heating. He worried for a moment that he might sweat through the paint. 

Gaara paused a moment, then repeated himself. _Let them have it. It reassures them to see the Kazekage disarmed._

Right. Lee lifted his chin, pulling his arms (and by extension, Gaara’s warm hand) close against his body. 

They were about to cross the threshold when the little man stepped in front of them again. 

“Sir, your weapons?” 

Lee frowned. He hadn’t brought any kunai or senbon with him. To be frank, he didn’t really _need_ those things, as much as they were sometimes helpful in a pinch. His own two hands were registered as lethal weapons in four out of the five Great Shinobi Nations, but he couldn’t very well take _those_ off. 

The man gestured to Lee’s ankles. “Your weapons?” he repeated. 

Gaara’s fingers tightened in the crook of Lee’s arm. “They’re training weights,” he said, in that tone of his that brooked no argument. The same one he used on visits to Konoha when he wanted Lee to quit his training and join him for a meal. 

Lee just nodded. He understood; the weights’ bulk alone was heavy enough to kill someone if he took them off and threw them. And they were lined with pockets where in the past he had stored all manner of staves and nunchaku, even though at present they were empty. 

He stooped to unbuckle them and stood with the weights draped across one arm. 

“Please just tell me where to put them!”

The little man frowned. “No one is allowed in the weapons check room. I can take them.” He held his hands out towards Lee, his stubby fingers open. 

“Are you sure?” Lee extended the weights towards the man, holding them out just over his outstretched hands. 

The man nodded. Lee loosed his grip just slightly, just enough to give the guard a tiny hint of the heft of the weights. 

The man’s knees bowed. He staggered, eyes wide. 

“Just put them over there,” he relented with a brusque gesture. 

“Thank you very much!” Lee chirped. He folded the weights neatly beside Gaara’s gourd and took their check-in ticket from the man’s trembling fingers. 

It was only a short wait in line at the door, where yet another guard checked their invitations for any hint of forgery. Kankuro had truly spared no detail, Lee noticed appreciatively as Gaara handed over their invitations with his thin fingers. Spirals of gold-flecked paint crawled from his wrists down to his fingers, the same pattern as his face, gold glinting on his dark skin. Even his nails had been painted, little crescents of teal and gold that just as quickly retreated into the wide sleeves of his robe, clenched back on the bend of Lee’s elbow.

Lee wasn’t quite sure how much of Gaara’s leaning on him was a deliberate show of weakness, and how much was him genuinely struggling to walk in his finery. He was weighed down by so many layers of thin crepe silks and fine linens that Lee was surprised he could move at all. 

They crossed the arched entryway into the ballroom, and Lee’s jaw dropped. The doorway itself sparkled with sea glass in every shade of blue. Elaborate, curling mosaics crested the walls like waves. The high, domed ceiling had been crafted so finely that Lee could hardly see the joins between the massive slabs of bright white stone. 

“Wind Country craftsmanship,” Gaara said appreciatively, no small amount of pride in his voice. “There’s no mortar holding this building together. It’s all just perfectly cut rock and gravity.” 

Music lilted gently through the room, flutes and drums and strings. In the corner, Lee spied a musician playing a three-stringed instrument he had never seen before, with a long neck and oblong body painted with scrollwork. 

“A sintir,” Gaara explained at Lee’s look of confusion. “Light wood and camel skin.”

“It’s beautiful,” Lee said lowly. 

Gaara merely inclined his head in response, the corners of his mouth curling ever-so-slightly, his smile visible only because of the paint. 

They circled the room arm-in-arm, the crowd in their silks and golds and braided hair and painted skin parting around them. As they walked, Gaara pointed out the traditional clothes of the various tribes and clans, teaching Lee their names in languages Lee could never hope to speak.

“Karakou,” he said, as a woman passed them in a dark jacket embroidered with white and silver thread, the patterns so intricate it was dizzying. “Sefsari,” he indicated with his chin as an old woman stooped past in a long, white veil. 

Lee tried gamely to repeat the foreign consonants, and his efforts must have at least amused Gaara, because there was a crinkling in the dark paint near his eyes. 

Without the weights bearing his feet to the floor, Lee felt as if he were walking on air. All his anxieties seemed to fizzle away with the smell of spiced food and the sound of light chatter, the side of Gaara’s body pressed warm against his. 

“I cannot believe it,” he whispered, his head bent to the edge of Gaara’s headdress, doing his best to dodge the ornamentation. “I feel as if I could fly!” 

“I need to sit,” Gaara announced, struggling under the weight of the rams’ horns. 

Lee quickly found them a table in one corner of the room, two seats behind a vase stuffed with long, thin pieces of fascinatingly shaped wood and hanging with black-flecked crystal. 

“That’s driftwood from the coast,” Gaara told him, his headpiece very nearly toppling as he gingerly took his seat. “And storm glass. When lightning hits the sand on the shore, it creates those crystals.” 

Lee tried very hard to be impressed with the ornamentation, but he was distracted by the tension dominating the lines of Gaara’s neck and shoulders. Without much forethought, he placed a hand at the base of Gaara’s skull, holding the heavy headdress just slightly away from Gaara’s head and supporting it. 

Gaara sighed, and his body relaxed against Lee’s. The fine texture of his hair tickled the webbing between Lee’s fingers. 

Lee’s blood burned hot within him. He flagged down a passing waiter with a tray of canapes to distract himself. 

The waiter arrived at their table. Behind the hanging red veil of the turban wrapped around his head, his right eye rolled mechanically. One of Kankuro’s puppets, Lee realized. There were several such planted around the wide ballroom, additional eyes and ears controlled by Kankuro’s delicate machinations. Lee looked around the nearby tables and passing groups of people for Kankuro and Temari, who were supposed to have entered after they did—separately, so as not to arouse any suspicion—and didn’t see them. 

Unthinkingly, his fingers worked tiny circles into the tense muscles at the base of Gaara’s skull, right where his head joined his neck. Gaara sank back into Lee’s hand, darkened eyelashes fluttering. 

A woman glided past the table on soft-soled slippers, pausing just long enough to examine the tray in the waiter’s lifelike hand. Kankuro’s painting had really improved since the last time he had seen one of his automatons in action, Lee had time to think, before the woman spoke.

“They may have dressed him up—” the woman said behind her hand, head inclined towards her tall male companion. Her voice was pitched just loud enough to be deliberate, an invitation to eavesdrop. Dozens of tiny silver bells tinkled at the hem of her kaftan. “—but a Konohan is still a Konohan.” 

Gaara’s fingers gripped Lee’s elbow, five little points of sharp-nailed heat. His fingers were moving, Lee realized after a moment, but he couldn’t discern the words between the simmering of his skin and the hot flush of shame sweeping through him. 

After a moment, Gaara abandoned all pretense of clandestine communication. He craned up, tugging on the veil hanging from the back of Lee’s flat felt cap. Lee let his head be pulled down to the level of Gaara’s face.

“I saw that man walk out of the bathroom without washing his hands,” Gaara whispered. 

Lee bit his lip to stifle a giggle. That was unkind, he thought, but the woman _had_ been very rude. 

Gaara’s lips were still nearly touching the side of Lee’s face, the hot gust of his breath behind Lee’s ear unexpectedly sensual. Heat crept up the back of Lee’s neck. Gaara’s fingers remained tangled in the veil there, the fabric all too thin against the warmth of Gaara’s fingertips. 

Suddenly, there was the simultaneous ringing of what seemed to be hundreds of tiny cymbals. Lee looked up in surprise as the string player, previously playing a slow plucked tune, began strumming his instrument in earnest. A horn started up, followed by a drum, and all around the dance floor couples touched hands, circling each other in a quick-footed dance. 

“Gaara-k—I mean, Gaara!” Lee almost shouted. “I didn’t know there would be _dancing_!” 

Gaara’s fingers fell to the surface of the table. His head, previously tilted towards Lee’s, jerked upright. He held himself very stiffly, supporting the weight of the headdress all on his own again. 

“Yes,” he said tightly. “There’s always dancing.”

“Do you know how?” Lee enthused. “Can you show me?” 

“No.” There was a moment’s pause; his eyes flicked over to Lee. “I can hardly move in this thing, much less dance.” 

“So you _can_ dance!” Lee’s fingers found Gaara’s upper arm through the many layers of his robes, pulling at him. Then he gasped, scandalized. “You _lied!_ At Naruto-kun’s wedding, you said you couldn’t—!”

“I can’t dance the way you do in Konoha,” Gaara corrected him. “But every Sunan child’s education includes the traditional dances.” He fell silent for a moment. “Even mine, meager as it was.” 

“Can we at least go watch?” Lee asked. “And you can tell me about it! I love dancing. Gai-sensei used to have our team learn dances as part of our training. He says I have the natural gift of rhythm.” His whole body was vibrating with the energy of the music. Beneath the thick, embroidered cloth overlying the table, his foot tapped along to the beat. 

“Fine.” Gaara got heavily to his feet, leading the way to the edge of the dance floor. 

As they arrived, the strings faded and were replaced by the sound of yet more drums. A single flute began piping, its tune high and reedy. A group of men circled the center of the floor and all stomped in time.

“You’ll like this one.” Gaara went up on his tiptoes to reach Lee’s ear. His grip was fierce in the bend of Lee’s arm. Lee stooped to accommodate him. “It’s a martial dance. To prepare for war.”

Lee’s eyebrows furrowed.

“Of course, there won’t be a war tonight,” Gaara continued. “At least, not if I can help it.” 

The men began moving all in sync, their feet quick in a choreography clearly familiar to them but completely alien to Lee. As they jumped, Lee realized the reason for the tassels on the shoulders of most of the mens’ robes. They shook with every step, vibrant points of color all across the dance floor. Lee clapped in delight, his shoulders starting to shimmy in time with the beat of the music. He regretted suddenly the lack of tassels on his own long jacket. 

Gaara was watching him out of the corner of his eye. Lee fell still. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Is that not appropriate?” 

Gaara’s eyelids fluttered. It was hard to tell under the heavy paint, but Lee suspected he had rolled them. 

“It’s fine, Lee.” Gaara nudged him gently with the toe of his shoe. Lee could feel the shape of Gaara’s foot through the soft, dark leather and thin soles. “You were having fun.” 

A woman began to sing, something high and ululating, and was echoed by the dancers. More women joined the floor, their clothing a dizzying array of layered blues and greens, pinks and reds. Bands of jingling gold medallions were strung across their faces and shoulders. For all his finery, Lee felt almost underdressed. The gold stitching on his long shirt and tight-ankled pants lay flat; no noise followed him with every step. 

“This dance is for unmarried women,” Gaara said, just as Temari spun past them, arm-to-arm with two strangers. Lee wondered why she had spent so much time on styling her hair, only to cover it up with a long, beaded veil. 

“But Shikamaru—” Lee began.

Gaara kissed his teeth. “Ah. The word is the same in Sunan. It might be different in Nin-go.” 

Lee’s was impressed, as always, by Gaara’s easy facility with the mosaic of Wind Country’s languages and cultures. He spoke not only his native Sunan and flawlessly unaccented Nin-go, but several of the languages of the outlying tribes and villages as well. Lee, meanwhile, had no mother tongue to call his own. His parents had died when he was young, when he only had a clumsy, childlike grasp of their language, and his aunt and uncle had deposited him at the ninja academy as soon as they were sure he could earn his own keep. His grasp of Nin-go still felt weak at best; as an adult, he remained uncomfortable with all the registers of respect and closeness, sticking to the conjugations that he knew were polite, even when it made him seem distant.

“She doesn’t have any children yet, so—” Gaara gestured to the dance floor. “For the purposes of this dance, she’s … ” Gaara’s upper lip wrinkled just slightly, so quickly it could have been a trick of the light. “... a maiden.” 

Lee realized then that the women circling the floor were all ages, some of them in the heavy red makeup that designated them as the wives of high-ranking clan leaders, some of them with locks of grey hair trellising through the gold ornamentation under their veils. It made a sort of sense, Lee thought. Lineage was very important in Suna; even the Kazekage position was inherited. Lee wondered idly what would have happened if all of the Kazekage’s children had been born without any ability for ninjutsu, like he had. Though he supposed that was why marriages in Suna’s jounin class tended to be arranged, and why the shinobi aristocracy had so many more children than the civilians. Not only could they afford it, but they needed a suitable heir for their family name.

Lee wondered if Gaara would one day have to face such an eventuality. A spouse not of his own choosing, a mandate to produce an heir, even if that wasn’t what he wanted. His fingers grew cold with the thought, and he realized, seconds later, that he had balled up his fists. 

The music increased in speed. Far away across the floor, Temari seemed to stumble in her paces, then just as abruptly righted herself. 

Lee straightened. That was the signal. They needed to find somewhere to receive Kankuro’s communication, and quickly. 

Gaara was in front of him suddenly, hands on either side of Lee’s face, pulling him close. 

Gaara’s hands were warm and heavy on Lee’s cheeks, fingers brushing his ears. Lee let Gaara’s weight bear him down, until they were forehead-to-forehead, Gaara’s hot breath on Lee’s painted mouth. The veil hanging around Lee’s neck dangled and half-obscured their faces. 

Gaara’s lips hardly moved when he whispered, “Pretend we’re sneaking off for a quickie.” 

Lee’s eyes went wide. Breath stuck in his throat. One of Gaara’s hands trailed down his neck, his shoulder, his arm, squeezing at him. The motions were so large and obvious, it hardly felt like Gaara was touching him at all. He was acting more like a romance-addled teenager than the reserved, wry man Lee knew. Telegraphing lust to the rest of the ballroom. 

A warm hand slipped up the wide sleeve of Lee’s robe. Small fingers interlaced with his and tightened. 

Gaara dragged him from the ballroom, and all Lee knew to do was stumble behind him. As they passed, a small group of women turned to each other and began to whisper, giggling behind their gold-adorned hands. 

Gaara’s fingers made space in the hollow of the palm of Lee’s hand and began to tap, movements quicker than their footsteps. 

_We need to find somewhere private,_ Gaara’s fingers said to Lee’s skin, _where we won’t be overheard._

He slipped Lee behind a partition, a lightweight folding screen made heavy with draped fabric and hanging crystals. The corridor behind was warm and undecorated, with plain stone floors and arched ceilings. Little alcoves were set into the wall along the length of the passageway, inset with shelves heavy with glasses and serving trays. A waitress in red passed between two doors at the end of the hallway. A slit at the hem of her pants revealed the mechanical ball-and-socket joint of a puppet’s ankle above her black satin slippers. 

“Here,” Gaara whispered. Hands on Lee’s hips pushed at him, until he was positioned halfway into one of the emptier alcoves, the small of his back pressed up against a stone shelf. Gaara squeezed in beside him, all too close for comfort with the volume of his robes. His headdress wobbled, and Lee grabbed his waist to steady him. 

A telltale tug of chakra at Lee’s collar drew his attention away from the narrowness of Gaara’s hips and waist, the way the firm muscle tensed beneath layers of cloth. 

Gaara fiddled with his earring, and a faint vibration like a dulled electric shock ran up Lee’s throat to the earring in his own ear.

“Report.” He heard Gaara’s low voice in front of him a beat before it echoed mechanically in his ear. 

For a moment, there was no sound at all, and Lee wondered if they had somehow broken the transmitter, or if the heavy stone around them was too much for Kankuro’s filament-fine chakra threads. Maybe they needed to move somewhere more out in the open? Only that would destroy their cover. 

Just as Lee was about to suggest they go out to the gardens instead, the little piece of metal on his ear vibrated. 

“We found the assassin,” Kankuro’s voice came through tinny. Gaara’s eyes widened minutely. Even in the shadow of the alcove, they seemed to glow, flashing blue-green with the glassy shine of Gaara’s flat pupils. Lee’s hands tightened on Gaara’s waist. 

“Keep an eye out for her, she’s from the _bzz-bzzz-bzzzz—_ ” Kankuro’s words trailed off into static. 

Gaara cursed under his breath, fiddling with the transmitter on his ear. 

“Did you catch that?” he hissed. 

Lee shook his head. Gaara unpinned the brooch from among the many hanging necklaces on his collar and squinted on it. 

Just then, voices carried up the corridor. 

“Don’t worry, Karai-chan, the servants here are very discreet,” said a man’s thickly accented voice in somewhat broken Nin-go. “Nobody will see us.”

Gaara’s eyes had gone wide, but his body wasn’t moving, his fingers clenched bloodless on the gold brooch. Lee could think of only one thing to do. They couldn’t be caught here whispering into a transmitter, and there was only one plausible reason for them to have snuck off here. 

He pulled Gaara close and crashed their lips together.

  


* * *

  


“Oh!” a woman’s voice gasped, footfalls coming to a halt. “Let’s leave them be.” It was clear she was trying to whisper, but her voice was obviously ill-suited for it, high-pitched and carrying.

Gaara assumed the couple left. He couldn’t be sure; he didn’t hear them go and he couldn’t focus enough to sense them out with his chakra. All he could feel was Lee’s mouth, hot and hard on his, the broad hands that crushed their bodies together, fingers locked like steel bars in the small of his back. The pin of the brooch pricked his finger and drew blood. He didn’t care. 

Lee moved his mouth. His lips parted just slightly, inviting something deeper, something more sensuous. Gaara fell forward against him. Lee’s touch flooded his senses, and he drowned. 

There it was, all of a sudden, looming up inside him. That terrible emotion he had been unwilling to speak even to himself, that little thread of selfishness that found him seeking Lee out for this particular mission. The true _why_ underlying all the rationalization and strategy and mission objectives. 

The fact of the matter was, Gaara wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to play this role. Wouldn’t have _allowed_ anyone else. Because what he really wanted, down below the gold ornaments and the heavy silks and face paint, beneath the Sand Armor and the thin shield of his skin, was this. But he wanted it forever, and he wanted it for _real_. 

And if he couldn’t have the real thing, he would accept the facsimile. A memory he could hold onto, one day when the Council assigned him a bride from some high-born clan, when all he’d ever wanted was the impossible, extraordinary ordinary. Just one night of pretend, for the sake of Suna. 

( _But it’s not really for Suna, is it?_ whispered a voice he hadn’t heard in a long time, in the back of his mind.)

Deep down, Gaara was still a monster. Taking what he wanted any way he could get it. Living for his own desires. 

He bit Lee’s lip in his clumsiness, and Lee made a stifled noise, halfway between a squeak and a groan. Gaara swallowed the sound. His whole body was on fire with the knowledge of how Lee’s mouth tasted, like greasepaint and spices, with how Lee’s hands felt, heavy palms sliding up his waist to grasp him around his ribs. 

Then, just as quickly as it had started, Lee pulled back. Their mouths separated with a wet gasp. 

Lee staggered back to his full height, wiping his mouth on the back of his sleeve. 

“Are they gone?” he whispered, leaning down so close that Gaara could smell the cardamom on his breath. 

A shudder racked him. He cast his chakra up and down the span of the hall, consciousness in every stray fleck of dust on the sandstone. One of the puppets was still whirring back and forth between the kitchen and the hall, replete with Kankuro’s chakra, but otherwise there was no one. 

He nodded, and in doing so realized that the pins at his hairline had come loose. He let go of Lee’s hips to adjust his headdress, fingers numb and fumbling with the unwieldy contraption. 

“I am so sorry,” Lee was saying. Gaara had little patience for his apologies. The gold paint on his lip was smeared with the teal of Gaara’s. There would be no hiding what they had done. “I just thought—since that’s what everyone thought we were doing anyway—” 

Of course, he thought. Tactics. 

Gaara finished pinning his headdress with a particularly brutal stab of the final pin through the netting that held it in place, glancing against his scalp. 

“It’s fine,” he said, and wondered at the reediness of his breath as he spoke. “It was a clever strategy.” 

The hot bright line of pain along his scalp joined with the dull throb of the still-bleeding pinprick on his finger and distracted him from the fact that Lee’s hands were still slotted along the sides of his body. The brooch in his fingers buzzed, and he hurried to pin it back to his lapel. 

“—hear what I said?” Kankuro’s voice came through the earpiece. 

“Yes,” Gaara said breathlessly, still distracted. “The important parts, anyway.” 

“I have to go,” Kankuro hissed. “Someone’s giving me the stink-eye.” 

“Wait, I didn’t—” Lee began to say.

“What, can’t a guy get a little privacy when he’s tryin’ to take a piss?” Kankuro shouted. 

With a sharp, pinching gesture, Gaara severed the chakra connection. 

“Was he in the _bathroom?_ ” Lee whispered, his voice high and tight with disgust. 

“Probably.” Gaara stuck his head out of the alcove, looking up and down the passageway. “Let’s get back before we’re missed.” 

They were followed back into the ballroom by a pair of men in the daimyo’s grey. 

Gaara tensed, his hand in the crook of Lee’s arm ready to signal a message to flee. Unlike the lush red of the serving staff, they were dressed to fade into the background in their plain, belted yukata, invisible and unobtrusive. 

One of them swept a nearby empty glass onto a tray in his hand. Cleaning staff, then. Gaara let himself relax.

“Got to feel a little bad for the guy, don’t you?” the taller of the two men said in Sunan. 

“Hmm? What do you mean?” replied the shorter man. “He’s riding high on the boar. Just look at what he’s wearing. Fabric like that doesn’t come cheap.” 

Out of the corner of his eye, Gaara spied him dumping the dregs of a half-empty beverage into a potted plant. Gaara rankled; the desert fern’s soil had been perfectly moist before, and now the roots would rot unless someone caught it and fixed it. He had a hand splayed in his sleeve, half intending to compress the soil and squeeze out the excess liquid, when the taller man responded.

“Yeah, but … shacking up with a monster like that? Would it really be worth it?” 

Under his fingers, Lee’s forearm flexed. His jaw was tight beneath the paint; his Adam’s apple jumped. Lee didn’t speak Sunan well, but clearly he understood enough. Enough to know that he was being talked about—that _they_ were being talked about. Gaara dug his fingers into the muscle, warning Lee to stay silent. Better not to let the men know they’d been overheard.

“You really believe those rumors?” The short man chuckled, stooping to pick a napkin from the floor. 

“Believe them? I _know_ them!” The tall man had abandoned all pretense of working now to gesticulate. “You know Ayato? Her brother was one of his guards. It was supposed to be a prestige position, y’know, kid from the outer clans with a little bit of ninjutsu, babysitting the Kazekage’s kid. Everyone’d heard about the demon, sure, but he was only, what, four? What the hell was he gonna do to anyone?” 

“And what _did_ he do?” The shorter man’s mask of indifference had dropped, now. Gaara recognized the eagerness for gossip in his voice, how closely it mimicked bloodlust. 

“Got mad one night—some nightmare or something, whatever, kid stuff. But he woke up, right? And it wasn’t him in control anymore, it was the demon. She said his eyes were yellow and beady, just like a tanuki.”

“How would she know that? She wasn’t there, was she?” 

The taller man shrugged indifferently, making a vague _search me_ noise. “Anyway, Ayato’s brother? He crushed him.” The man snapped his hand into a fist. “Big ball of sand and blood. They had to identify him by his teeth. That’s all that was left of him.” 

Gaara looked up at Lee. His eyes were on the dance floor, but his posture had lost none of that rigidity. 

_Ignore them,_ he tapped into the bend of Lee’s elbow. He had no idea whether or not Lee understood, if he was rooted in place by his anger or had declined to act out of good sense. Though Gaara suspected it was not the latter; Lee was not known for holding his tongue when it came to defending his friends. 

Gaara thought he remembered the boy, his former guard. He had been a chuunin, young, before all of Gaara’s defense detail had been required to rank special jounin at a minimum. He spoke with the accent that Gaara later came to recognize as hailing from Eastern Wind Country. 

Gaara didn’t recall the guard’s name, but he did remember that night. It had been the last time he’d been allowed to sleep, before they started siphoning chakra into him to keep him awake, as a child when his chakra stores were too small to sustain that effort on his own. He _had_ woken from a nightmare, that much was true. But it hadn’t been the demon in control, it had been Gaara. And he hadn’t crushed the man, either. That was long before he taught himself the Sand Coffin. He had thrown him from a window when he broke the bedroom door down at the sound of Gaara’s screams. 

As for the teeth—Gaara almost laughed. The Sand Coffin didn’t leave behind _whole teeth_. 

That was how the rumors always went, though. Some grain of truth, wrapped in the trappings of a horror story. Shaped by a feeling of _rightness_ without a care for facts. Lies passed from hand to hand, growing and distorting each time until they came to resemble belief. 

Lee bent his head down to the edge of Gaara’s headdress.

“Can we go somewhere else?” 

Gaara was more inclined to stay back and see what else the men had to say, but there was a vein starting to bulge at Lee’s hairline, like he was halfway to opening a gate. The muscles in Lee’s arm jumped, and Gaara realized that the arm he held was Lee’s bad one. Just a few thin layers of fabric down were the mottled red marks left by Gaara’s sand, the signs of where Lee’s dreams had almost been torn from his body. Gaara had only seen them once, when Lee was changing his bandages on a joint mission. The scars were red and angry still, as if they had never truly healed. Gaara had hardly even opened his mouth to apologize when Lee had hastily covered them up with his sleeve, ashamed. 

Of course all this talk of Sand Coffins and death by crushing upset him. Gaara was being callous. 

He was about to oblige Lee when a bell rang out over the crowd. 

Lee’s head popped up, eyes searching. His hackles raised like a guard dog’s. 

Gaara pulled him back down by the sleeve to explain. “Dinner will be served shortly. Shall we?”

Lee’s answering nod was curt, but he allowed Gaara to lead him to the wooden door on the far side of the ballroom. 

The doorframe was crafted from heavy, dark-stained wood, and the room within was lined with the same. Oak, maybe, Gaara thought, or ironwood. It had to be imported, because no trees in Wind Country grew so tall or so thick. The largest were the scrubby spruce pines that sprouted up around the coast, and those were hardly suitable for furniture, much less construction. 

The door slid into place behind them with a heavy thud, the gap utterly seamless. The music and chatter from the ballroom fell silent. Gaara attempted to sense for the sandstone bedrock and found its answering vibrations muted. Several feet of wood boxed them in on all sides. It was almost ironic, Gaara thought, that someone had spared no expense in crafting this tomb for him, to eliminate any chance of him seizing a weapon. 

A low oaken table dominated the center of the floor, varnished black. Already several dignitaries and their partners had taken up residence on the heavily embroidered cushions scattered around. Without the grounding reverberation of sand and stone beneath his feet, Gaara felt moorless.

“It certainly is decorated differently in here,” Lee muttered. With the dark woods and heavy red fabrics, the room more closely resembled a Fire Country nobles’ den than a Wind Country dining room. 

A red-vested waiter slipped by them with a telltale chatter of his teeth. 

Gaara exhaled. He may have been virtually defenseless in here, but at least he wasn’t entirely alone. 

A short, squat man approached them, his face painted in a melange of greys, black marks all along his cheeks. It took a moment for Gaara to recognize him as the daimyo, with the way his thick moustache had been slicked down and painted to blend into his makeup. 

“Lord Kazekage,” the daimyo greeted him with a slight incline of his head. 

“Your lordship.” Gaara bowed in return, careful not to lose his headdress to the floor. “Lee, this is the daimyo of Wind Country.” 

Lee bowed low. “Your lordship.” He turned to the tall woman at the daimyo’s shoulder. She nodded in his direction. Her long, white hair was elaborately plaited into a crown that encircled her head. Even in the unpainted skin exposed by the precise zigzag of her part, her skin was very pale. “Your … ladyship?” 

She held out a long-fingered hand, and Lee stooped to kiss the backs of her fingers. The kiss was gentle, quick, wholly appropriate and customary for greeting a lady of the court. There was no trace of the harsh eagerness with which Lee had claimed Gaara's mouth just minutes before. Smudges of Gaara’s makeup remained around his mouth. Still, a prickle of jealousy climbed the back of Gaara’s throat. 

“Oh no, no,” the daimyo chortled, clapping Gaara on the back as if they were old friends. Gaara started, missing the dulling mask of the Sand Armor. “Misaki and I are just getting to know each other! Isn’t that right, Misaki-chan?” He laid into the pet name with such saccharine affection that Gaara felt a bit nauseated. 

“Yes,” she murmured, hardly parting her mouth. Her smile was sickle-thin. “Just getting to know each other.” 

They ended up seated between the daimyo’s party and the newly coronated head of the Jackal Clan, close to the head of the table and the seats of highest status. Misaki sat to Gaara’s right, her long legs curled under her like an insect’s. There were thin plates of some porous white stone sewn to the soles of her shoes, to make noise while she walked. 

In contrast to the thick, dark markings that obscured much of the daimyo’s cheeks and browbone, her face hardly seemed to be painted at all. Her skin was powdered completely white, her forehead dominated by two dark red circles. Gaara didn’t recognize the pattern as originating from anywhere in Wind Country. 

“I’m not familiar with your clan markings,” Gaara said to her, masking his probe for information under the pretense of politeness. 

“You aren’t?” She arched a shaven eyebrow. One of the red circles on her forehead wrinkled, like ripples in a pool of blood. “Hmm. I suppose you wouldn’t be.”

Gaara hadn’t needed Kankuro’s warning after all, he thought, watching the way she seized her knife as dinner was served; the assassin’s identity was clear. 

She spun her golden dinner knife in her hand as if it were a kunai. All the cutlery in the room was gold, another slight against Gaara, placing him at a disadvantage when he couldn’t manipulate the precious metal the way his father and the second Kazekage had been able to. A simultaneous showing of wealth and rubbing in his face the ways Gaara had failed his lineage. The woman—Misaki, if she hadn’t given a false name—was clearly shinobi-trained, and not afraid to show it. Which meant she had no intention of attacking Gaara unawares. She would let him stare his death down, mere inches of space and gossamer-thin pleasantries away. 

Her presence also meant it was no longer safe to communicate with Lee the way Gaara had been. There wasn’t a chance that she wouldn’t interpret every word he pressed to Lee’s skin. 

Gaara cut his eyes at Lee. Lee raised his chin with a firm, determined glint in his eyes. Though he didn’t look at them askance, Gaara knew: Lee saw it too. 

“What part of Wind Country do you hail from?” Gaara pressed.

Misaki turned her head, her eyes tracked from Gaara over to Lee, then back to Gaara again. She smiled like a blade being unsheathed, a quick shine of silver-white teeth beneath her white painted lips. 

“I don’t,” she said, the words cold as morning mist and smooth as oiled steel. “You’re not the only one who can solicit a lover from outside the border, Kazekage-sama.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please look at [this absolutely amazing art](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/436362125791723531/744658602882498610/Skeleton_Key.jpg) by [Whazzername](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whazzername) of Lee and Gaara in their outfits!! It's so incredible!!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long. An extended and hearty thank you to [trustmeimthe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trustmeimthe) for hauling this chapter out of mediocrity and spending literally hours talking me through the finer points of Naruto characters' motivations.
> 
>  **Warnings** this chapter for canon-typical but detailed body horror, canon-typical blood and violence, oral trauma, choking/suffocation, references to canonical extermination of a clan, classism, structural oppression, mentions of sexism, and discussions of arranged marriage.

Lee probably should have guessed this would happen. 

The Nara Clan had their deer. The Inuzuka had their dogs. So it was only logical that the Jackal Clan would have … well. Jackals. 

He just hadn’t thought to expect that the newly coronated head of the Jackal Clan would have brought a dog as her plus-one. It made sense in a way, though. Even under all her paint and regalia, the Jackal Clan’s leader looked so terribly young. Vulnerable despite the decorative metal claws perched on thumb-tips like thimbles. 

Her father had died during the last Great Shinobi War, Gaara had explained as he and Lee were making the rounds of the ballroom. He hadn’t been a ninja; he had only been protecting their clan’s lands from fire in the chaos. Lee remembered the stray jutsu that had seemed to find their way unfettered into the civilian villages, even far from the battlefield. The Jackal Clan was large, and jockeying for the position of regent had been fierce until the new clan head finally came of age. 

“A difficult few years,” Gaara had phrased it, with characteristic reserve. To Lee, it sounded like the girl had been through ten years of _hell_. 

“Souga,” she introduced herself when Lee took his seat beside her and her four-legged companion. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.” 

He took her offered hand and shook it. Her hands were rough like a workman’s, her grip strong. She wore a headscarf hanging with what Lee thought at first were bells, but upon further inspection discovered were silver-plated fangs. Her dog wore a collar to match, sitting upon the gilded cushion next to her as if he had been trained solely for that purpose. He posed regally, chin lifted, completely undistracted by the comings and goings of the people around them, ignoring their cries and chatters and scents. 

The restraint in the jackal’s disposition was utterly alien to Lee, accustomed as he was to the Inuzuka’s working dogs and their rough-and-tumble nature. Akamaru never would have sat in front of a plate of meat and waited patiently for it to be cut for him, certainly not without at least begging or whining. But the animal at Souga’s right hand made not a sound. 

“Your puppy is adorable,” Lee told her. “He’s so well behaved!” 

When she smiled, her canine teeth were stained carmine red. 

“Thank you,” she said, “but Nonou’s an adult.” Her Nin-go was thickly accented, but her grammar was impeccable.

“Oh, I just meant—” Lee stammered. 

“I know what you meant.” She blinked slowly. Her eyelids had been painted to resemble yellow wolf’s eyes, the lids divided by slitted black pupils. “I was correcting you.” 

Lee swallowed audibly; a spoonful of thick stew caught in his throat.

Souga turned back to the cutting of her dog’s meat, thin blood pooling beneath the red of its undercooked surface. After a moment’s fruitless sawing, she threw the gold knife down with an expression of disgust. She shook the sleeve of her fur-lined jacket, and a fierce-looking knife with a carved bone handle appeared in her hand. Beneath its blade, the meat fell into even pieces as easily as training boards cracked along their seams when kicked. 

“Eat up, Nonou,” she said with a tone dripping affection. Then she turned to see Lee’s shocked expression, and her face went blank. Her voice was flat when she said, “What.” 

Lee was glad for the heavy paint concealing the worst of his embarrassed blush. “Nothing, just, um. The invitations said … and the guard at the entry …” He pulled at the collar of his robe. 

“Don’t tell me you _actually_ disarmed at the door.” She threw her head back in a laugh. Short and sharp, like a dog’s bark. “Konohans really are as simple as they say, huh?” She dipped her head and looked at him meaningfully. One clawed hand pulled at the collar of her jacket as she craned her neck forward. 

Down the back of her shirt, Lee saw the gleaming points of no fewer than four hand spears. 

She sat back up with an abrupt snort. “You’re new to this, I can tell. Let me give you a little advice. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s this. _Never_ show up to a party unarmed.” 

She couldn’t have been more than eighteen, but the look of disdain she gave Lee could rival that of even the most hardened of Konoha’s elders. 

Lee stuttered, “But, the weapons’ check—”

She rolled her eyes with a flash of yellow paint. “It’s easier if you’re a woman, because the male guards can’t pat you down. And they’re _always_ men. But all you have to do is strap a sword to your belt and hand that over, and they never think to check your shoes—” She folded back the leather fastening of one of her knee-high boots to show a dagger within. “—or your cheek.” She opened her mouth and Lee saw the silver line of a senbon laid along her tongue. 

“You shouldn’t be showing me this,” Lee whispered urgently. “What if you get in trouble?” 

“What are they gonna do, kick me out of my own party?” She barked another laugh. “Besides, you really think your Kazekage over there handed over _every_ weapon?” 

“Gaara is—” Lee spoke falteringly. “—very honest. He’s a man of his word.”

She gave him a sly look, the corner of her mouth quirked. Then her eyes widened. “Oh _no_ —” She almost choked on the liquor in the golden cup she held. “—You really believe that, don’t you?” 

“Of course.” Lee’s face prickled with a cold heat. 

“So is the brainwashing part of the induction into the Kazekage’s harem,” she drawled, “or are you just special?” 

Lee’s fingers clenched on the handle of his golden spoon. The metal warped into the shape of his fist. “Gaara does _not_ have a harem!” 

Souga gave him a wide-eyed look. Lee froze. That had been too loud. He cast an anxious glance at Gaara, but he was absorbed in a quiet conversation with the daimyo’s far-too-young date. The _assassin_ , Lee reminded himself, who he needed to be paying more attention to than—than to defending Gaara’s _honor_ , or whatever it was he thought he was doing. The veil of Gaara’s heavy headdress had fallen along the side of his face, so Lee couldn’t make out the shape of his lips, and he spoke too quietly to be overheard. Lee’s fingers itched to push the fabric out of the way. 

When he turned back, the expression on Souga’s face was different. Softer, somehow. Sympathetic, bordering on pitying. 

“No harem?” She exhaled heavily through her nose. “Rumors travel faster than the truth, I guess. Still, it must be hard, being so far from your home. Living with _him_.” 

Lee glanced to his left again, trying to imagine it. Gaara had his knee bent up beside him—truthfully, it was a miracle he had managed to sit down on the low cushions at all without Lee’s assistance, but Lee supposed he was practiced at these things—and the fabric of his robes draped to lay on Lee’s leg. It weighed on him as heavy as if it were a touch. Suppose this charade were real life, and he had really abandoned Konoha to be at Gaara’s side … indefinitely. 

Lee had never really thought of leaving Konoha. It was where he had grown up, where his friends and his teacher were. He spoke the language—awkwardly, sure, but at least he understood all of what was said to him. He knew where in the calendar the festivals fell, the polite way to greet someone upon arriving home, how to use the single-burner stoves in the jounin apartments. Suna was so _different_. The food, the clothing. A pastiche of languages that Lee only understood a few words of. It was easy to accidentally offend, and no amount of bowing or Nice Guy Poses seemed to help once you’d gotten on someone’s bad side. 

And Gaara … Lee had spent a few overnights with him. Mostly missions, back before Gaara assumed his station. But that was hardly _domestic_ , and on missions, Gaara never slept. He’d told Lee he was able to, nowadays, with the demon stripped from him. It was just that on missions he preferred to keep his guard. But if they shared a _home_ … What would Gaara look like in the mornings? Would he be sleep-rumpled, with pillow lines on his face and with his already unruly hair in worse disarray than normal? Or would he appear as perfectly composed as he always did, rising from the bed as if from a funeral plinth? Lee knew the things Gaara liked to eat when he was in Konoha, but in Suna, did he cook? Did he use the Sand to help him clean the house? What did he wear when he came home from the Kazekage Office, when he had his few hours off-duty? Did he even own pajamas?

Something scratched at the back of Lee’s mind. An echo of: _You shouldn’t be thinking about this._

He turned to his right, where Souga sat looking at him expectantly. 

“It’s not so bad,” he said, and believed it as he spoke it. “Gaara-k—” He choked around a _k_. “ _Gaara_ is worth it.” 

She chuckled lowly. “I recognize that look. You weren’t planning to fall in love with him, were you? It’s always the soft ones …” She shook her head. “Probably why they picked you. I bet you told yourself you were doing this out of duty to your country. They didn’t warn you you might end up with _feelings_.” She spat the word like a curse. 

The heat on Lee’s face climbed up to the tip of his ears and down to the nape of his neck. She wasn’t as far off as she should have been, given that this was all meant to be an elaborate ruse.

Lee ducked his head, rubbing at the back of his over-warm neck. 

“It’s a shame. A monster like him will never love you back.” 

Lee’s head shot up to stare at her. Her face was again a mask of flat indifference, as if she were merely reciting numbers from a log book, some objective truth. 

Underneath the table, Lee’s free hand found Gaara’s ankle. Through the layers of cloth, he grabbed it and held on, gripping the jut of bone like an anchor point. 

Lee knew a little something about monsters, he thought. More than this child, anyway, however wise and world-weary she might have appeared. 

“Monsters get a bad reputation,” Lee said, aware of the way his lips were pursed primly, the tightness of his voice, “but some of them are just misunderstood.” 

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gaara looking at him curiously. 

A change of subject was clearly in order. 

Lee turned and pretended to be very interested in his soup. 

“And—and what about you?” he mumbled.

“What about— _oh_.” Souga scratched her jackal behind his ears. “Nonou’s all I need. More loyal than a man by far. I’m not going in for the whole arrangement thing, not if I can help it. My father’s advisors have sent me a whole dictionary’s worth of suitors, but I turned them all down. I don’t have time for _romance_.” She quickly wiped the dagger in her hand on one of the fine linen napkins, leaving a smear of blood. It vanished back up her sleeve. “I’ve got priorities.”

“Priorities?”

“Fixing all this mess with my clan, to start. You’re a foreigner, so you probably don’t know about this stuff, but my people outnumber the daimyo’s clan five-to-one. The only reason that stuffy, stuck-up jackass over there pulls all the strings is because everyone thinks he’s ‘high bred’, and that the Jackal Clan are a bunch of thieves and miscreants. So we struggle every single day to live hand-to-mouth, while he sits up here in his marble palace, calling all the shots.” 

“Oh,” Lee said quietly.

“And even thieves have more honor than _this_ ,” she carried on. “A code. Rules. Never take more than you need, and never take from anyone who needs it more than you. You think if I was a thief, I wouldn’t be robbing this place blind? All this useless metal—”

She rapped Lee on the back of his knuckles with a golden spoon. Its bowl dented inwards.

“See? Wasteful. Talk about thievery, how much food was stolen from the mouths of starving people to pay for this whole display? And for what? To show off to a bunch of rich folks who’ll just compare it to the next fancy party and the one before it? To jockey for my favor, so they get my people’s products and labor for less than they’re worth?” She pushed the bowl of the spoon back into shape with the thrust of one weathered thumb. Even reformed, when she lifted a spoonful of soup, half the liquid splashed out and back into her bowl. She gave Lee a knowing look. 

“I didn’t know,” Lee said to his hands. “I’m sorry.” 

She shrugged. “Why would you? You’re just a civilian. You’re not even from here. What would you have done even if you had known?”

“Um.” Lee faltered. “I could probably talk to Gaara, at least. And put in a good word for you all, or something. I don’t know a lot about … politics, or trade, or—or anything, really, but Gaara is … he’s very concerned about making sure everyone has the things they need. Suna used to struggle like that, too. He might even have some advice. He came into power very young, too.” 

Souga snorted into the plush fur of her collar. “That’s rich. The Kazekage throwing his hat in with me would only make targets out of the both of us. Suna gets by because they have shinobi. Nobody in my clan can do _magic_. We’ve got our teeth and our claws and that’s it. And as for leadership … well. There’s not as much to be scared of. I’m not exactly a monster who kills people and feeds their blood to my sand.” She said it almost wistfully, as if she wished she _were_ more bloodthirsty. 

“Besides, the Kage and the daimyo, that’s a natural alliance. A monster and—” She sighed. “—I don’t know what the daimyo is. Worse than a thief, for sure. Probably worse than a monster, too.” 

Lee looked over to the daimyo. The little man was rocking with laughter, slapping the back of some dignitary sitting next to him, his moustache wobbling. He didn’t _look_ like a monster. Then again—Gaara nudged Lee’s knee with the soft leather toe of one shoe—neither did Gaara, as far as Lee was concerned. And people certainly seemed to have no trouble considering him a monster.

A waiter bent down between Lee and Gaara to take their soup bowls with a rattle of joints.

The small golden earpiece of Lee’s earlobe whistled with staticky feedback. In between the hisses and pops, Lee heard Kankuro’s voice.

“— _bzz_ —just found out she has— _bzzzz_ —”

Lee looked to his left, where Gaara had frozen in his seat. He had heard it, too. 

The earpiece crackled louder, shriller. Lee fought the instinct to clap his hand to his ear. They had missed all of Kankuro’s first message, and now the thick wood that caged the dining room was interfering with the second transmission. Lee didn’t relish the idea of facing a completely unknown opponent of as-yet-unrevealed capabilities. Especially since, with Gaara disarmed and encumbered by his formal wear, Lee could hardly rely on him for much more than moral support. 

“ _bzzz_ —hear me?— _bzz_ —careful!”

Lee looked to the door, then back to Gaara. One of them needed to get out of here, _fast_ , and find Kankuro. If they had at least an inkling of what they were up against, maybe they could formulate a plan. 

Gaara couldn’t exactly leave the room. Not without causing a diplomatic incident, anyway. 

… But Lee could. Nobody here expected _manners_ from him. If anything, his whole purpose in this charade was to make a bad impression. And he was the faster of the two of them anyway. Leaving Gaara unguarded—even for the amount of time it would take Lee to find Kankuro and race back—was a risk, but it was a calculated one. And perhaps Lee stepping from the room for a moment, leaving Gaara seemingly vulnerable, would be enough to draw the assassin out. 

Lee caught Gaara’s eye. Gaara tilted his chin just barely in acknowledgement. 

“Um, excuse me.” Lee clambered awkwardly to his feet. He flagged down one of the human waiters, older and more heavily moustached than the rest, his red vest lined in black silk that made him appear slightly more formal than the rest of the waitstaff. “I am so sorry,” he whispered loudly. “I need to please be excused.” 

“Nobody is allowed to leave until the conclusion of the dinner.”

Lee’s face burned with a flush. With the right mix of bluster and politeness, he figured he could bumble his way out of here. “I understand, it is just—I need to use the, um, the little shinobi’s room … It’s an emergency,” he squeaked.

The head waiter’s nostrils flared. “The _rest_ rooms are just down the hall to the right, sir.” He led Lee to the door and did something complicated with his fingers that caused the seam in the wood to reveal itself. “Someone will have to escort you.”

“Oh, how about … him?” 

The head waiter rubbed the crease between his eyes. “That’s fine. Kuroari?” 

The waiter slipped behind Lee without a word. As he extended his arm to hold the door open, Lee caught a glimpse of the gears in his wrist.

  


* * *

  


The moment Lee stood, Gaara missed his touch. His hand hadn’t left Gaara’s ankle since whatever Lady Souga said to upset him. The pressure had been pleasant, grounding. Now Gaara’s skin felt all too untethered, as if he might just leave the earth and float away. 

Across the room, the door slid closed behind Lee. Gaara tensed. Kankuro’s puppet had left with him, and now Gaara was utterly alone. He trained his eyes on his cup of sake. Letting his bodyguard leave the room in exchange for intel was not a risk he had weighed lightly. Now even so much as turning his head put him at risk of a slow death by poisoning. But they were nearly halfway through the meal, and the assassin had yet to show her hand. 

He could only hope he hadn’t erred in his judgment. And that Lee would prevail upon that legendary speed of his to make it back here before Misaki managed to kill him. 

Gaara felt more than saw Misaki’s head turning towards him. Her white teeth gleamed as her mouth spread slowly into a smile. There was something off about it now, though, something crooked. Where before she had been all cool grace, now even the swivel of her neck seemed to simmer with barely pent-up rage. 

“Kazekage-sama,” she said, all clipped consonants and the snap of teeth. “I expected better strategy from you than _this_.” 

Gaara scarcely moved as her hand crept up from under the tabletop to seize his wrist. Something sharp dug into his skin from her palm. A concealed weapon, most likely. That _release_ at the door had been too weak to dispel anything but the most incompetent of genjutsu. 

He wrested his arm from her grip with a shredding of fabric. Her sharp nails, loath to release him, clawed across his wrist and took his skin with them. He winced, scrambling to his feet and skidding to the far side of the room away from her. 

He was less wounded than he should have been, and he was briefly grateful for the excessive layers of his robes, hindrance that they were. Still, a few spots of his blood hit the floor with a spatter.

This, more than anything else, seemed to alert the other guests that something had gone horribly wrong. The gathered nobles gasped as one. Over the throbbing of his wounds, Gaara thought he heard a woman shriek. 

It had been a long, long time since anyone had injured Gaara, but he couldn’t let the pain distract him. He quickly dispatched his headdress to the floor and crouched as best he could with his body restrained by his clothing, bracing himself. 

Misaki stood very slowly. Gaara prepared himself to dodge, fingertips on the shiny lacquer of the floor. Without his Sand, there would be no putting a quick end to this. His best bet would be to keep dodging her until Lee made it back. Gaara’s taijutsu was better than it had been when he was a child, but it still wasn’t his strong suit. Besides, he could barely move to fight in these clothes. And if this woman had managed to sneak a blade—or blades—into the gathering, there was no telling what else might be up her sleeve. 

He needed a distraction. A way to get her talking, and keep her talking. 

“You seemed surprised, earlier, that I didn’t recognize you,” Gaara called to her. “Have we met?” 

There was a crash as someone upturned the heavy table, food and cutlery scattering to the ground. The dignitaries huddled behind the table’s bulk as Misaki picked her way through and over them with careful deliberation. Was she really going to keep physically attacking him? Poisoning would have been cleverer, Gaara thought, sparing a glance to the daimyo, who was peering over the edge of the table with a look of sick glee on his face. 

“I’ve never met you, and you’ve never met me. But my whole life has been marked by your actions.” Misaki’s nostrils flared with irritation. There was real anger on her carefully painted face now, wrinkles in the red marks on her browbone. “You _still_ don’t recognize it? Who I am? Where I’m from?” 

She held up her hand, and sharp bones slid seamlessly into the skin of her palm. 

Gaara’s eyes went wide. It was as if a ghost had walked into the room and stood in front of her body until their images merged. The white hair. The red paint. That _kekkei genkai_. 

The Kaguya clan. 

But _how?_ Kimimaro Kaguya had died nearly fifteen years ago. Gaara had _watched_ him die, and had nearly died himself in the process.

“Now you do,” she said, halfway sing-song. Her voice had gone high, almost childish. Mocking. _Now you see me, now you don’t._

She twisted her upper body with a sickening crack. Reaching beneath her robes, she withdrew the pointed spurs of three ribs and fanned them between her fingers. 

She hurled one of the ribs towards him like a shuriken. It whistled through the air. Gaara threw himself to the left. Too slow. It caught the collar of his robe and pinned it to the wall. He tried to wrench it free, but the bone was dug in deep to the rich wood, the embroidered fabric thick and resistant to his efforts. 

She came closer. The bone plates on the soles of her shoes clicked with every step. Gaara struggled like a fly caught in a spider’s web. She towered over Gaara, the look on her face somewhere between twisted glee and curiosity. The same way a child looked before they were caught burning ants with a spyglass. Had she always been so much taller than Gaara, or had she stretched the bones beneath her skin so that she now towered over him?

“How did you survive?” he asked, his genuine curiosity warring with his desire to flee. “I thought your whole clan burned.” 

Everyone knew the story. The tale of the legendary blood lust of the Kaguya Clan, who sought violence only for the sheer joy of it. Who rose up against the Mist Village, not for the sake of riches or power, but for the taste of blood on their swords. It was a story Gaara might have once related to. He might have seen himself reflected in the pools of blood the Kaguya drew on their foreheads. 

But the Kaguya Clan had lost, and in losing forfeited their lives to a pyre. Bodies stacked like kindling a dozen feet high, every man, woman, and child. They said you could smell the smoke for miles, to the edges of the far-flung island of the Land of Water. 

Misaki wrapped one long-fingered hand around the hilt of the rib, dragging it up the wall with a hideous screech until Gaara was in her eyeline, his toes barely touching the ground. Pinned and wriggling, an insect on an entomologist's corkboard.

Plates of bone cracked through the skin on her forearm, stacking and layering like the scales on the wing of a butterfly until her whole arm was stiff, mottled white armor, pulsing in time with her agitated breathing. 

“They couldn’t burn me,” she said. “When the flesh burns away, the bones remain.”

“That _kekkei genkai_ is rare,” Gaara rasped, hands at the front of his collar, trying fruitlessly to tug it away from his throat and keep it from choking him. “That’s why Kimimaro was imprisoned. He said he was the only—”

“Don’t—!” she snapped, “—speak as if you knew him.” 

Gaara breathed heavily through his nose as she hauled him higher. The air was growing thin; his legs wheeling in the air. The jingle of the gold ornaments on his robes rang like funeral bells. 

“Were you close?” he wheezed. Even with the edges of his vision blurring, he could see that she was young. Younger than Kimimaro would have been, had he survived to today. Despite the marks of what looked to be years’ worth of hard living on her skin, she might even have been younger than Gaara. “His little sister?” he ventured.

A conflict writ in miniature waged itself across her face. Some were emotions Gaara recognized: hurt, fury, guilt, mistrust, loneliness. Some he couldn’t name. 

“No,” she said, and her voice had fallen quiet again. The voice of a small child coming from the mouth of a young woman. “My clan feared his power because they couldn’t control him. So from the moment I first saw my metacarpals migrating beneath my skin, I knew I could never let them know who I was. _What_ I was. I fought alongside them, as if I were the same as them.” She cast her eyes to the ground, but her focus was somewhere distant. “He could have done it, too. If he had been smart enough to hide like me. Then he wouldn’t have been just sitting there, waiting, when that monster Orochimaru came to claim him.” 

That characterization, Gaara couldn’t disagree with. There were monsters, and then there were _monsters_.

“I can still smell their bodies,” she said to the air. This conversation, Gaara realized, was not between himself and Misaki, but between her and the ghost in the room, standing between them with Orochimaru’s curse mark on his heart and blood on his lips. “I played dead in the middle of them and wrapped myself in bones and prayed against prayer that the flames wouldn’t touch me so that I could go find him. The two of us could have survived together. With strength like ours we could have faced the loneliness of the world. But by the time the bodies cooled and I clawed myself free, his cell was empty.”

Gaara’s vision was narrowing down to pinpricks. Something high was whistling in his ears. The transmitter, or the last of his breath. 

With the final dregs of his strength, he kicked at her with both his legs. It was a desperate, clumsy move, but it startled her. 

She jumped backwards. Her knees bent backwards with a _snap_ like the bursting of burnt twigs. 

The spur of bone lodged in Gaara’s collar dragged down the gouge in the wall with a screech, borne to the ground by his weight. 

He hit the floor with a gasp and felt the earth beneath him spin. He sucked desperately at the air, feeling as if he were about to vomit. 

“He was stolen from me!” Misaki shrieked. She was heaving with rage now. Her legs popped and crackled, twisting this way and that as if water were boiling beneath her skin, until she stood yet taller, her knees still bent eerily backwards, like a grasshopper reared up on its hindquarters. “I chased rumors of him for years! I was _this close_ —!” A bone sprouted from her thumb, squared off like a whetstone. She sharpened one of the remaining ribs against it with a shrill of bone-on-bone. “But then you finished him off!” 

Gaara wobbled to his feet. His hand sought the wall behind him for stability, groping at the thick wood. She couldn’t have been holding him up for more than a few minutes, but a few minutes without oxygen might as well have been a century. _Where was Lee? What was taking him so long?_

“I heard you laughed, when you crushed him. While he begged for his life. You didn’t care. You took a whole forest down and him with it.”

Gaara had done no such thing. Kimimaro would have killed him easily, and Lee besides, if his lungs hadn’t betrayed him first. But the details weren’t worth quibbling over. Whatever she believed, whatever kernel of truth there was to the center of it, her pain was still the same. It was written all over her face, now bristling with spurs of bone surging and subsiding from her cheeks and forehead. And Gaara had had no small hand in it. However faultless he considered himself, however noble. At the time, he had seen himself protecting an ally, a friend. Now he saw that in that same breath he had snatched away the last of this woman’s hope. 

She chucked a second blade at him. It was all he could do to turn his face at just the last second, so that it barely grazed him. It nearly snared the gold ornamentation on his ears, Kankuro’s now-silent transmitter and his mother’s heavy key. 

“Do you know what it’s like, Kazekage-sama,” she shouted over the grinding of her bones, “to grow up completely alone? To have to fight every step of the way for your own survival? To be the only person _like you_ in the entire world?” 

“Yes,” Gaara panted.

“Liar,” she snarled. “Murderer.”

She drew the third rib up in her fist and charged at him. 

Gaara tried to lurch out of the way, but all he managed was to stumble over the hems of his robes, falling to one knee. Misaki’s hand caught like a claw at his shredded collar. With a heave of her body and a surge of her twisted legs, she bore him down to the floor. He flailed. A clumsy fist to the side of her wrist knocked the rib from her hand. It skittered across the floor to lodge itself in the far wall. 

She sneered at him. The bones of her fingers lengthened through her skin, sharpening and seeming to multiply, until his neck was caged to the floor. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, tilting his head back and exposing his throat. He would have let her kill him, if he thought it would make anything better. If he thought it would help more than it would harm. 

For a moment, Misaki’s eyes went wide. The crown of her braided hair was in ragged disarray. Sweat shimmered through the red paint on her forehead, making it run. Rivulets like blood trailed down her pale skin.

Then she bared her teeth. Right before Gaara’s eyes, they sharpened and grew long, until her face was a monstrous grimace. 

“ _Sorry_ won’t bring him back,” she said, her words distorted through her fangs. 

She raised her free hand. Her ulna cracked through the skin of her wrist like a bayonet. 

Gaara closed his eyes. He clenched a fist. 

The sandstone of his mother’s earring dissolved right through the metal. The grains formed themselves into a half-dozen tiny spikes, each as precise and sharp as a senbon. 

They flew true, straight to Misaki’s throat. 

They were so fine that even at their proximity, their home was only known by the spots of blood that appeared on the collar of her silk robe. 

Misaki made a choked noise. The hand that had been pinning Gaara flew to her neck. Her pupils shrunk to pinpricks in shock, swimming in the green of her eyes. 

“I’m sorry,” Gaara repeated. He spread his fingers, and the little sandstone needles twisted their way deeper. 

Or—they _should_ have. 

Thick panels of bone surged up Misaki’s chest and throat like plates of armor, covering her like the hard shell of a beetle’s wings. The sand dislodged and fell to the floor like so much useless soil. 

She smiled. Blood dripped from her gums and the holes made by her fresh new teeth. 

Her hand sought his throat once again, and he struggled beneath the weight of her body and the ceremonial robes weighing him to the floor. 

Then there was a scream. Not of fear. A roar of anger. A snarl and a sharp bark. 

A blur of fur and silvery fangs charged in from either side. Suddenly a bone-handled dagger was at the underside of Misaki’s chin, a jackal’s mouth wrapped around her wrist. 

Lady Souga wrestled Misaki backwards off of Gaara, throwing her to the floor. 

“Go!” she yelled over her shoulder, and Gaara scrambled to get his feet under him, soft leather slippers sliding on the slick wood. 

Misaki turned her head, her face a mask of rage, and spat her mouthful of teeth directly at Souga’s fur-lined chest, flecks of blood flying. 

Souga fell backwards. Her dog howled. 

“Dynamic Entry—!” 

The thick wooden door cracked in two, its halves flying across the room to collide with either wall. 

“Gaara-kun!” Lee shouted, rushing the room. “I just spoke to Kankuro-kun, and—Oh!”

Misaki reared up on her elbows, spitting blood and bone and fury. 

Faster than the eye could track it, Lee swung out a foot and kicked her squarely across the temple. Her neck twisted impossibly, and her head hit the edge of the upturned table with a dull _crack_. 

She collapsed to the ground, unconscious. 

With a flick of Gaara’s wrist, his Sand came slithering into the room and bound her wrists and ankles. A coterie of Kankuro’s puppets clattered through the open door, their red vests ripping as their chests opened to form a prison and entomb her. 

Lee dropped to his knees at Gaara’s side, his fingers gentle on Gaara’s injured wrist as a crowd of Jackal Clan guards flooded the room with their dogs at heel. 

“Are you all right?” Lee whispered. 

“I’m fine,” Gaara replied. He clambered to his feet, leaning heavily on Lee. His wrist stung, and his knee would be bruised from falling to the floor, but he was overall unharmed. He could once again feel the earth humming beneath him. His Sand Armor climbed his arms and legs and nestled close against his body like a second skin. “But the Lady—”

Everything seemed very distant. Through the door, the band’s music faltered. One of the noble women was sobbing. Voices raised in shouted debate in at least three languages. A pair of Jackal Clan guards were clapping the daimyo in cuffs and leading him from the room. Several more rolled away the barrel chests of Kankuro’s puppets, the unconscious Misaki inside. 

Lee’s arm was warm and steady around Gaara’s back as he turned, but then his mouth dropped open in dismay.

A group of women in fur coats clustered Lady Souga’s fallen body, blocking it from view. 

Their jackals started baying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Nonou_ is colloquial Egyptian Arabic for "baby".


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is, the conclusion! There's a short epilogue that's already written that I'll post tomorrow, but that's it for this one, folks!
> 
> Skuun, happy (belated) birthday once again. I hope you enjoy the Padme-and-handmaid moment in this final chapter. Thank you as always to [trustmeimthe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trustmeimthe) for a super-speedy beta job. Remaining mistakes are mine.
> 
> Warnings this chapter for mentions of blood and mentions of oral trauma.

Lee walked on careful, quiet feet over to the circle of women and their howling jackals. Souga’s fanged headscarf had fallen to the ground, tangled around a shard of bone. Her thick fur jacket lay crumpled beside it, its front panels absolutely shredded, studded with loose teeth whose tips were smeared with blood. 

Something soft and wet nudged Lee’s left hand, dull through the scar tissue. He looked down to see Nonou sniffing his fingers. He stooped down and rubbed the dog behind his ears.

“Hey, don’t baby him,” called a gruff voice. “He’ll start getting ideas.” 

Lee’s head shot up.

In the space between two women’s heads, he saw Souga. She was sitting propped up against the chest of one of the other women, looking exhausted and winded but _alive_. Someone had taken off their shawl and used it to wrap her hair. 

Lee hurried over to her. Some of the women in her entourage shook knives from their sleeves, on guard, but Souga waved them down. 

“But your coat—” Lee started.

“Yeah.” Souga sighed. “Shame, it used to be my father’s. I’ll patch it up.”

“No, I mean, how did she not _kill you!”_ Lee cried. One of the women had draped her gauzy robe over Souga’s torso, but through the fabric Lee could still see the holes in her shirt, the little spots of blood. 

Though … not as much blood as he would have expected, given the length of the teeth strewn across the floor. 

Souga huffed a little laugh, then winced as it seemed to agitate her ribs. She knocked a fist against an unmarked section of her chest. It resounded hollowly. 

She was wearing armor. 

_Of course_ she was wearing armor. 

She gave Lee a look that managed to convey simultaneous disappointment and smugness. 

“Didn’t hold up as well as I hoped. Those teeth punctured the leather pretty good, just to the skin, but still. It’s only a couple cuts and bruised ribs. Nothing that bandages and rest won’t fix.” 

Lee’s body sagged with relief. He knelt down beside her, her ladies parting to make space. Nonou snuffled at his ear loudly, then licked it. 

“Thank you very much,” he told her, hoping his meager words could convey the sincerity and depth of his feelings. “You saved Gaara-kun’s life.” 

She gave him a puzzled look, mouthing, _Gaara-kun?_ Her eyebrows furrowed. 

“He … hired you,” she said slowly. “As a bodyguard.” She said something in a dialect Lee didn’t understand, but that he suspected was a curse. “Either you’re a much better actor than I expected, or you have terrible luck.”

“I’m a dreadful actor,” Lee admitted. 

“Smart of him, though.” Souga nodded appreciatively. “Nobody would’ve expected the leader of Suna to hire a civilian bodyguard.”

“Actually …” Lee dropped his voice. He probably shouldn’t have been telling her this, but she’d find out soon enough, if she was going to ally herself with Gaara. “I am a shinobi.”

“Oh.” Her mouth opened in frank curiosity. “Then why didn’t you bust in here all—” She puffed air with her mouth and mimed blowing fire, then gestured as if she were shooting lightning from her hands. “I mean, that kick was impressive, but …” 

“I cannot do ninjutsu or genjutsu,” Lee recited the familiar confession. “You do not need either to be a shinobi, where I’m from.” 

“Is that so.” Souga hummed. “Well. I’ve got a couple tough guys and gals who wouldn’t mind learning how to kick like that, if you’re ever up for it.”

“I don’t come to Wind Country often, but I know Suna also has several such shinobi! I’m sure Gaara-kun would be more than happy to help.” 

“Yeah?” Souga cut her eyes over to Gaara, who was simply standing back with his arms crossed, watching their interaction with an impassive, unreadable expression. “Well, you promised to put in a good word for me. And I saved his neck, so he better.” 

“Thank you again for that. “ Lee’s face heated with shame. “I should have been here for—” 

Souga held up a hand. “Stop. I didn’t do it out of altruism. I saw a choice, and I made it.” She looked back at Lee. “I do owe you an apology, though. You were right.”

“I was?” 

“About monsters. That some are misunderstood. I’d rather ally myself with someone who used to be a monster and regrets it, than ...” 

Over by the door, the daimyo was kicking up a fuss against the Jackal Clan guards, shouting something about lawyers and coups.

“I should go deal with that,” Souga sighed. “Things are gonna start changing around here, but it’s not going to be easy. ”

“Of course!” Lee jumped to his feet and held a hand down to help Souga up. 

One of her ladies-in-waiting stepped between them, giving Lee a cautioning look. She snapped at him in a language that Lee couldn’t quite decipher. Over her shoulder, Lee saw two more of the women helping Souga to her feet.

“He doesn’t understand,” Souga said in Sunan. She clapped the woman on the shoulder, and the woman turned to look at her leader warily. Souga’s face was already pale from just the effort of standing.

The woman replied in a rapid patter of Sunan. All Lee could make out was “bandages” and “medicine” and a word that he would have been sure meant “stupid”, if it weren’t for the fact that the woman was speaking to the leader of her clan. 

“The clan first, then I’ll worry about me,” Souga replied. She made a little _shoo_ -ing gesture towards Lee, over the woman’s shoulder. “Go on,” she segued in Nin-go. “Go tell the Kazekage I expect to speak to him later. We’ll need all the help we can get.”

Lee crossed the room. Over by the far wall, he noticed a dark bulk, faintly shining with golden ornaments. He jogged over to it. Gaara’s headdress was miraculously still intact. 

He picked it up carefully and hurried back to where Gaara was standing, watching him.

“So she’s alive,” Gaara said placidly, as Lee gently set the headdress atop his hair. He looked much less excited about its preservation than Lee was. “Good.”

“Yes! Isn’t it wonderful?” Lee fiddled very carefully with the pins and netting that held the thing in place, cautious not to scrape Gaara’s skin. “She wants to talk to you later.”

“I expected she might.” 

Lee stood back to examine his handiwork, giving the headdress a few final adjustments. He smiled at Gaara. There, good as new. 

Well, _almost_ as good as new. 

There was a gaping, serrated hole on the high collar of Gaara’s robes. Through it, Lee could see a hairline scrape and the hollow where Gaara’s shoulder met his neck. 

“Oh no, your fancy clothes …” Lee’s fingers fiddled with the fabric and beneath he felt, not warm skin, but the cool scrape of the Sand Armor. 

“Leave it.” Gaara’s cold, rough hand found Lee’s and stilled him. “It will mend.” 

Lee froze at the touch. Gaara reached up and cupped the sides of his face, pulling him down close. Their foreheads touched, the texture of the Sand Armor harsh on Lee’s skin. 

“Thank you,” Gaara murmured, with just the slightest movement of his lips. They were so close, and they looked so _soft_. 

_I didn’t do it out of altruism._ Souga’s words echoed in Lee’s ears. Lee needed to tell him. The confession pressed up against the back of his teeth. He couldn’t keep lying. Gaara couldn’t go on thinking Lee had agreed to this out of a sense of duty, or even friendship. Lee couldn’t have Gaara continue trusting him when he didn’t deserve that trust. 

Gaara’s eyes flicked up over Lee’s shoulder. That was the only warning Lee got before someone grabbed his ear with sharp-nailed fingers, snarling, “You!” 

Lee struggled to turn in Temari’s iron pincers as she hauled him upright. Her expression under the fine black-and-gold whorls of her makeup was rancorous. 

“You were supposed to protect him! What were you thinking, leaving the room?” 

“Ah, I am so sorry—” Lee gasped. He was used to quite a bit of pain, but Temari’s grip was so fierce that he feared she might pull his ear right off his head. “I failed—” 

“Temari, stop.” A thin curl of sand wound its way up between Temari’s fingers and Lee’s fragile cartilage, pushing his hand off him. “Lee saved my life.” 

Temari’s piercing gaze snapped to Gaara. “Don’t think you’re not in trouble just because you’re the Kazekage. Why did you let him out of your sight?”

“Kankuro—”

“Oh, he’s in for it, too, believe me—”

“Please,” Gaara interrupted her. Her jaw dropped, and she fixed him with a very odd look. “I’ll accept my well deserved lecture. Just, later. Look.” 

He gestured to the door. Whatever business Souga had been engaged in was concluding. Two large men and their dogs were leading the cuffed daimyo from the room, and the daimyo’s own guards were standing back and allowing it. The chaos of the small dining room flooded into the ballroom proper as the gathered nobles followed Souga’s lead. 

The ballroom was still loud with voices, full of directionless dignitaries milling about, uncertain what to do next. 

Souga crossed the room and climbed heavily onto the dais, where the silent musicians stood as if frozen in time. She snatched a tambourine from one of their hands and rattled it like a saber. The whole room fell silent to watch her, commanding every scrap of attention in the room. 

She gestured to someone at her side, and the same woman who had snapped at Lee before stepped up to stand beside her. Souga began to speak in her clan’s dialect, her breathing clearly labored, and the woman next to her began to interpret for her, first into Sunan, then into Nin-go:

“What’s with all the long faces?” The woman looked skeptically at Souga as if to confirm what she was saying before she continued. “This is supposed to be a party. I’m not gonna let a little fight ruin my party!” 

Souga shook her tambourine at the musicians. They all eyed each other warily for a beat. 

Then they began to play.

  


* * *

  


“This is unlikely to be a bloodless transition,” Lady Souga concluded.

“It never is,” Gaara agreed. 

She held out her hand to shake, and Gaara took it. 

“I look forward to our new alliance. I’ll send you a hawk as soon as you’re back in Suna.” 

If the Jackal Clan intended to follow through on stepping into the void left behind by the daimyo being arrested, they were going to need more protection than ever. Suna would lend its shinobi in exchange for an exclusivity agreement; the Jackal Clan would only turn to Suna when they needed to hire a guard detail, and would refrain from outsourcing to the neighboring Shinobi Nations. The agreement was beneficial to both parties, and Gaara was pleased to learn that Lady Souga was likewise interested in having some of her stronger fighters sent to Suna’s Academy to train in taijutsu. Shira would have his work cut out for him training them, and Gaara thought they might even need to hire additional taijutsu instructors, even if only temporarily. He had a short list already worked out in his mind, with one name at the top. 

A hand clapped him hard on the shoulder.

“Hey.” Kankuro nodded a greeting to the Lady. Gaara sniffed the air; he smelled like blood. 

“I’ll excuse myself so you can speak to your advisor.” Souga turned to look for Nonou, who had cowered behind a table leg at Gaara’s approach—animals had never liked him—but then she paused. “You’re the guy behind the puppets, right?”

Kankuro shrugged.

“That was some clever maneuvering.”

Kankuro’s chest puffed at the praise. 

“I have some engineers who’d be interested in talking to you. Figure you could get them to move without magic strings?” 

Kankuro billowed his cheeks. “Not sure,” he said. “Never tried it.”

“I’ll send another hawk.” She turned and walked away, snapping at the side of her leg. “Come on, Nonou. Scaredy-cat.” 

Her dog fell into step at her heel as she rejoined her party. 

“So-o,” Kankuro drawled. “That bone lady. Would you believe as soon as we clapped chakra cuffs on her, all her teeth fell out? Chick has gum disease like I’ve never seen.”

“She had a very hard life,” Gaara replied lowly, “from what she said.”

“Yeah, well, it hasn’t stopped her from talking. Tough to understand her, but she hasn’t shut up since we started questioning her.”

Gaara hummed in acknowledgement.

“The daimyo paid a pretty penny to bring her in from Water Country. But y’know what she said?” 

Gaara barely raised his shoulders. His neck hurt again, and Lee was far off on the dance floor, alternately stooping to pat the various jackals that now circled the room as if they were common pets and not heavily trained guard animals, and sweeping the old ladies off their feet with his dancing. He was a surprisingly quick study; it had taken Gaara years to learn the complicated steps of some of the faster dances. 

Sensing Gaara wasn’t going to guess, Kankuro continued, “She said she would have done it for free.”

Gaara sighed. “I suspect that’s the truth.” 

“Reckon we can draw up treason charges against the daimyo, but since she’s not a citizen it’s gonna be a little more difficult to pin her for anything more than assault. Mist trained her, so we could go after them if you wanted, but—”

“No.” Gaara shook his head. They had worked for peace too hard and too long. If they sought conflict every time a rogue ninja got it in their head to seek revenge, the war would never have ended. Besides, Mei still terrified him. 

There was a long pause.

“Would it be … unacceptable,” Gaara murmured, “if I pardoned her?” 

The face Kankuro made in response looked very similar to the face he made the last time Kiba visited Suna, and Akamaru had peed on Kankuro’s pant leg. He kissed his teeth.

“That one’s gonna be a question for Temari.”

Gaara nodded in acknowledgement. He looked back out towards the dance floor. 

Kankuro nudged his shoulder. “Go dance with him.” 

Lee had fallen into line with the other dancers almost effortlessly, making up for any misstep with raw enthusiasm. He looked happy out there. Carefree as he stomped his feet and shook his shoulders. 

“I can’t dance in this.” 

Kankuro made a rude noise with his lips. “Excuses. Isn’t this the whole reason you brought him here?” 

Gaara looked at his brother with disdain. “I brought him here for the mission.” 

“Oh yeah?” Kankuro reached over and wiped a thumb at the corner of Gaara’s mouth. He pulled his hand back and showed Gaara the smudge of Lee’s gold lipstick on the pad of his thumb. “And was this part of the mission, too?”

Gaara’s ears heated. “That was … tactical. A diversion.”

“Some diversion.” Kankuro’s upper lip wrinkled. “Listen, all I’m saying is, if you went and asked him for a dance, I don’t think he’d turn you down.” 

Gaara exhaled heavily. Out on the dance floor, Lee had taken the hand of a nobleman’s wife at the head of a line of dancers and was kicking and shimmying in time with the music. The look on her face was one of simultaneous delight and no small amount of scandal. 

Gaara crossed the floor, resigned. 

The moment Lee spied him, he immediately dropped his dance partner’s hand and hurried over. 

“Gaara-kun!” Lee’s eyes were bright and shining. Even trying to stay still, his shoulders moved faintly in time with the beat of the drums. “Do you want to dance?” 

“No,” Gaara said curtly. Then, after a moment to absorb the look of disappointment on Lee’s face, he steeled himself and continued. “Can I speak with you? Privately?” 

Lee’s eyes went wide. His posture snapped to attention. 

“Of course,” he breathed.

The gardens were just through an arced glass door off the side of the ballroom, so that was where Gaara led Lee. With the Sand Armor on, he missed the warmth of Lee’s hand in his, missed the solidity of the crook of his arm now that there was no excuse to lean on him. 

“Gaara,” Gaara said as he and Lee stepped onto the smooth sandstone path. 

“What?” Lee’s thick eyebrows furrowed downwards in a frown.

“You called me _Gaara-kun_ , just now. It’s Gaara. Just Gaara.” 

“Ah, Gaara-kun, I think our cover has been quite terribly blown…” 

Gaara’s head snapped to look at him. There was a rough-hewn stone bench nearby, and Gaara sat heavily on it. Lee remained standing, hovering awkwardly nearby. He looked like an especially colorful ghost, the iridescence of his robes shimmering in the wind that carried off the coast and blew between the plants. 

“I don’t care about our cover.” Gaara rubbed at his aching temples, pinched by the headdress. “I don’t want you to call me that anymore. I liked it when you called me my name.” 

“Oh.” Lee sat down beside him, but there was a cautious few centimeters of distance between their legs now. “Okay. If that’s what you want.”

The gardens were lit by lanterns strung between the thin trunks of undernourished scrub pines, their sand-accustomed roots dug far too deep in the moist, fertilized soil that the daimyo must have had shipped in just for the garden. Patches of wildflowers, drooping and badly out of season, clustered in neatly ordered rows, stripped of their free growth and individuality. Gaara stretched a hand down. The soil was far too acidic for the copse of opuntia that were barely clinging to life by his feet, their surfaces soft and pitted with overwatering. 

Lee’s hand lingered at his shoulder. 

“Are you … distracted?” he ventured.

Gaara exhaled through his nose. He wouldn’t be able to focus on what he wanted to say to Lee out here. 

“The plant care here is terrible,” he muttered. He would certainly find the palace gardener later on and have a word with him. Then he raised his hand. “Close your eyes.” 

Sand swirled up around their feet and deposited them on the rooftop. 

The night sky stretched out above them, an infinite wash of blue and black. There was no moon to speak of, and the stars were all blotted out by the light bursting from the palace windows and the city around it, so that the sky appeared misty and two-dimensional. Despite the fact they were in the same country, the sky looked nothing like the sky over Suna, false and unfamiliar. 

Gaara looked over to Lee, who was brushing stray grains of sand from the top of his cap. The roof was domed but still flat enough to stand on near its apex, the center of it dominated by a skylight made of mosaic seaglass. The light from the ballroom flooded through it, casting Lee’s face into splotches of blue and green atop the already foreign appearance of his facepaint. 

He looked up at Gaara and smiled.

At least that was the same. 

The strains of a well-known song wandered up through the skylight. Drums and bells and raised voices layered atop a quick beat. Gaara looked from the glass, to Lee, and back again for a moment, indecisive. 

He unpinned the headdress from his head and set it aside. Then he sharpened the Sand Armor on his hand into a blade and used it to cut the skirt of his robes right down the middle from the knees downward, so the restrictive fabric hung loose like pants. 

Lee gasped. “Your clothes!” 

Gaara dismissed his concerns with a wave of his hand. “You said you wanted me to teach you a dance,” he said carefully. “I can show you this one.” 

Lee’s mouth was wide open, and for a moment he didn’t respond at all.

“If you want,” Gaara added, thrumming with nerves. “I understand if you’d rather—”

“Of _course_ I want to dance with you!” Lee practically shouted. He rushed right into Gaara’s space and seized both of Gaara’s hands in his. “Please teach me. Gaara.” 

Gaara had shuffled the Sand Armor away quickly so as not to hurt him. Too quickly. His whole hand was bare when Lee grabbed it. The warm contact of his skin almost burned, tingling with a strange intimacy, now that this wasn’t just for display. He quickly shed the rest of his armor. They were all alone up here, with nobody to see what they did next.

“Mirror me,” Gaara said. He raised a hand and tapped one foot, toe to heel and back again. Lee copied him, and they fell into a quick rhythm alongside the music, whose tune hung distorted in the night air. 

Lee caught on quickly, almost instinctively. _The natural gift of rhythm,_ he’d called it. Well, Gaara certainly felt as if he were receiving a present, one wrapped in gilded robes and the pressure of Lee’s eyes on him as they spun towards each other, then away again, kicking and stepping in time. 

“Normally we would have swords,” Gaara told him breathlessly, as they came back together in the middle. “This dance is supposed to mimic a fight.”

Lee laughed, sharp and beautiful. “Perhaps next time we can bring weapons!” 

_Next time_. The idea of doing this with Lee _again_ made Gaara feel a bit dizzy, nearly losing his step as he stomped through the final beats of the song. He thought of it, the tinny clash of show-weapons against one another, the scintillating thrill of two swords meeting harshly, so that the vibration traveled up their arms and into their chests. Lee was always asking to spar with him, and it made the blood sing in Gaara’s ears every time. To do this again, all sweat and bodies moving and physical contact, with no pretense of _training_ would be— 

The music ground to its floor-shaking conclusion. The very air seemed to shimmer with its lingering energy. Gaara and Lee stood facing each other, their hands touching. Gaara’s lungs were aching for oxygen, but Lee hardly seemed out of breath at all.

Their faces were very close, and as the sintir player in the ballroom began plucking at the strings of his instrument in a slow rhythm, Lee seemed to drift even closer into Gaara’s space, drawn towards him as if magnetized. 

“Um, Gaara-k—” he stuttered, “ _Gaara_ , you should know that I—” 

It was the most natural thing in the world for Gaara to reach up, fingers smudging through Lee’s facepaint, and draw him down into a kiss. 

Lee’s mouth was hot, clumsier than it had been the first time. His hands grasped at Gaara’s hair, then his shoulders, then his waist, as if unsure where to settle. Gaara went up on his tiptoes for a better angle, his fingers pushing Lee’s hat and veil to the ground, hands mapping the shape of Lee’s skull beneath his slicked-back hair. 

Lee made a muffled little noise of surprise into Gaara’s mouth, and Gaara took advantage of the way his lips parted to sneak his tongue in to lick the inside of Lee’s bottom lip. _Now_ Lee was losing his breath, Gaara could feel it. Lee’s chest stuttered against his as he pressed closer. Lee took a couple of halting steps backwards. 

There was a _crack_ , and Lee stumbled, landing on his behind on the roof. 

Beneath his foot was Gaara’s headdress, one of its ram’s horns cracked in half. 

Gaara kicked it aside, climbed into Lee’s lap, and kissed him again.


	5. Epilogue

Gaara’s office door opened, and Temari stepped through with a stack of scrolls, looking harried. It had been an oppressively hot week, even for Sunan summer, and sweat stuck the strands of her bangs to her forehead. She stepped in front of Gaara’s slow-spinning fan—a gift from the Jackal Clan—with a sigh and a flutter of papers.

“Which of these do you want first?” she asked. 

“What is there?” Gaara looked up from mission scrolls spread across his desk with a sigh. Glancing into the hall and seeing that nobody was coming, he took off his Kage hat and scrubbed roughly at his sweaty hair. He had been wearing the hat all day, even though it kept the heat close to his head. There was the florid bruise of a kiss mark behind his ear, and he couldn’t let any of the office staff see it. Only the gods knew what sorts of rumors would have sprung up in the wake of the Kazekage walking around with a visible _hickey_.

Temari set the scrolls down with a clatter, throwing Gaara’s already disorganized desk into further disarray. 

“I’ve got the paperwork for the Kaguya girl’s pardon—the Council are _not_ going to be happy about that one, by the way—”

“When are they ever?” Gaara sighed.

“—and, sheesh, I lost count, but there’s at least a half-dozen of these from Lady Souga. What, does she send a hawk every time she has an idea?” 

“She’s … very enthusiastic about our alliance. I don’t believe her clan has ever had a powerful ally before.” 

Temari clicked her tongue. “Oh, and last is the hire request for taijutsu trainers to send to the Hokage. The Jackal Clan students should be here in two weeks. That one just needs your signature.” 

“That one first.”

Temari gave Gaara a sly smile and set the scroll in his outstretched hand with a _slap_. She sat on the back of the chair in front of his desk, her feet in the seat, leaning on her half-open fan for stability. 

“I thought you might say that.” 

Gaara quickly scanned the list, double-checking to make sure the most important name was on it—hidden discreetly around the middle of the page, of course, so as not to be obvious—and stamped his name in the corner. 

“You knew,” he said, looking up at his sister. “Didn’t you?” 

“Knew what?” Temari’s voice was artificially casual. “That you were in love with him and he was in love with you? Yeah, I knew that.”

“And that’s why you sought him out for the mission.” 

Temari pretended to study her fingernails. She hadn’t trimmed them since the party, though she had removed the polish, and they were still wickedly sharp. 

“He was the best choice, that’s all. You always fight hardest for the ones you love.” 

Gaara tugged at his earlobe, where his mother’s earring clung, lighter now, just the hollow gold shell without its sandstone interior. She wasn’t wrong.

“What if you had been wrong, though?” he pressed. “What if he’d gotten hurt?”

Temari stood and closed her fan with a _snap_. 

“I wasn’t,” she said simply. “And he didn’t. Despite both of your best efforts. I’m still mad at him, you know.” 

“I know.” The top of Gaara’s ear still stung a little from where she’d twisted it when he’d kept his promise to endure her lecture. 

She grabbed the stamped scroll from his desk. 

“I’m headed to Konoha tomorrow,” she said, rolling it up. “Is there anything else you need me to take with me?” 

“Ah, yes.” Gaara opened the drawer of his desk. Inside was a letter. It was neatly folded and signed by hand, not a scroll stamped with the symbol of Suna. He trusted Temari not to read it, though he suspected she knew its contents already. He handed it to her. “Keep it safe. Please,” he added.

Her face softened as she turned from him to leave.

“You know, Gaara,” she called over her shoulder from the doorway, “you should really learn to trust your advisors more.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Hit me up on Tumblr [@ghoste-catte](https://ghoste-catte.tumblr.com)!


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